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MATTHEW ARNOLD 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



BY 



GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A. 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT 
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1899 




4278e 

Copyright, 1899, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 



TWO 



COPIES f^ECBlVEU. 






Snibersitj ?3«s8 : 
^^ ' John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 






PREFACE. 



Mr Matthew Arnold, like other good men 
of our times, disliked the idea of being made 
the subject of a regular biography ; and the 
only official and authoritative sources of informa- 
tion as to the details of his life are the Letters 
published by his family, under the editorship 
of Mr G. W. E. Russell (2 vols., London, 1895).! 
To these, therefore, it seems to be a duty to 
confine oneself, as far as such details are con- 
cerned, save as regards a very few additional 
facts which are public property. But very 
few more facts can really be wanted except 
by curiosity ; for in the life of no recent person 
of distinction did things literary play so large 
a part as in Mr Arnold's : of no one could it 

^ Mr Arthur Galton's Matthew Arnold (London, 1897) adds a 
few pleasant notes, chiefly about dachshunds. 



VI PREFACE. 

be said with so much truth that, family affec- 
tions and necessary avocations apart, he was 
totus in tilts. And these things we have in 
abundance.^ If the following pages seem to dis- 
cuss them too minutely, it can only be pleaded 
that those to whom it seems so are hardly in 
sympathy with Matthew Arnold himself. And 
if the discussion seems to any one too often 
to take the form of a critical examination, 
let him remember Mr Arnold's own words 
in comparing the treatment of Milton by 
Macaulay and by M. Scherer : — 

"Whoever comes to the Essay on Milton with the 
desire to get at the real truth about Milton, whether 
as a man or a poet, will feel that the essay in nowise 
helps him. A reader who only wants rhetoric, a reader 
who wants a panegyric on Milton, a panegyric on the 
Puritans, will find what he wants. A reader who wants 
criticism will be disappointed." 

I have endeavoured, in dealing with the master 
of all English critics in the latter half of the 
nineteenth century, to "help the reader who wants 
criticism." 

^ It is impossible, in dealing with them, to be too grateful to Mr 
T. B. Smart's Bibliography of Matthew Arnold (London, 1892), a 
most craftsmanlike piece of work. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. 

I. LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUB- 
LICATION OF THE POEMS OF 1853 

II. LIFE FROM 1851-62 — SECOND SERIES OF POEMS — 
MEROPE — ON TRANSLATING HOMER . 

III. A FRENCH ETON— ESSAYS IN CRITICISM — CELTIC 

LITERATURE — NEW POEMS — LIFE FROM 1862 
TO 1867 

IV. IN THE WILDERNESS 
V. THE LAST DECADE . 

VI. CONCLUSION . 



INDEX 



47 

78 
123 
167 
213 

231 



MATTHEW ARNOLD, 



CHAPTER I. 

LIFE TILL MARRIAGE, AND WORK TILL THE PUBLICATION 
OF THE POEMS OF 1853. 

Even those who are by no means greedy of details 
as to the biography of authors, may without in- 
consistency regret that Matthew Arnold's Letters do 
not begin till he was just five-and-twenty. Even then 
they are not copious, telling us in particular next 
to nothing about his literary work (which is, later, 
their constant subject) till he was past thirty. We 
could spare schoolboy letters, which, though often in- 
teresting, are pretty identical, save when written by 
little prigs. But the letters of an undergraduate — 
especially when the person is Matthew Arnold, and 
the University the Oxford of the years 1841-45 — 
ought to be not a little symptomatic, not a little 
illuminative. We might have learnt from them some- 
thing more than we know at present about the 



2 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

genesis and early stages of that not entirely com- 
prehensible or classifiable form of Liberalism in 
matters political, ecclesiastical, and general which, 
with a kind of altered Voltairian touch, attended his 
Conservatism in literature. Moreover, it is a real 
loss that we have scarcely anything from his own 
pen about his poems before Sohrab and Rustiim — 
that is to say, about the great majority of the best 
of them. By the time at which we have full and 
frequent commentaries on himself, he is a married 
man, a harnessed and hard-working inspector of 
schools, feeling himself too busy for poetry, not as 
yet tempted by promptings within or invitations from 
without to betake himself to critical prose in any 
quantity or variety. Indeed, by a not much more 
than allowable hyperbole, we may say that we start 
with the book of his poetry all but shut, and the 
book of his prose all but unopened. 

We must therefore make what we can of the sub- 
ject, and of course a great deal more is to be made 
in such a case of the work than of the life. The 
facts of the latter are but scanty. Matthew Arnold, 
as all the world knows, was the son — the eldest 
son — of the famous Dr (Thomas) Arnold, Head- 
master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern 
History at Oxford, where he had earlier been a Fel- 
low of Oriel. Dr Arnold survives in the general 
memory now chiefly by virtue of his head-master- 
ship, which was really a remarkable one, whatever 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 3 

distinction it may owe to the loyalty of such a group 
of pupils as his son, Dean Stanley, Clough, "Tom 
Brown" Hughes, and others. But he was, if not 
positively great, a notable and influential person in 
many ways. As a historian he was alert and intelli- 
gent, though perhaps too much under the influence 
of that subtlest and most dangerous kind of "popular 
breeze" which persuades those on whom it blows 
that they are sailing not with but away from the 
vulgar. As a scholar he was ingenious, if not very 
erudite or deep. He was really a master, and has 
been thought by some good judges a great master, of 
that admirable late Georgian academic style of English 
prose, which is almost the equal of the greatest. But 
he was, if not exactly cupidus novarum rerum in Church 
and State, very ready to entertain them ; he was curi- 
ously deficient in logic ; and though the religious sense 
was strong in him, he held, and transmitted to his 
son, the heresy — the foundation of all heresies — that 
religion is something that you can "bespeak," that you 
can select and arrange to your own taste ; that it is 
not " to take or to leave " at your peril and as it 
offers itself. 

On August II, 1S20, Dr Arnold married Mary Pen- 
rose, and as he had devoted his teaching energies, which 
were early developed, not to school or university work, 
but to the taking of private pupils at Laleham on tlie 
Thames, between Staines and Chertsey, their eldest 
son was born there, on Christmas Eve, 1822. He 



4 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

was always enthusiastic about the Thames valley, 
though not more so than it deserves, and in his 
very earliest letter (January 2, 1848), we find record 
of a visit, when he found "the stream with the old 
volume, width, shine, rapid fulness, 'kempshott,'^ and 
swans, unchanged and unequalled." He was only six 
years old when his father was elected to the head- 
mastership of Rugby ; he was educated in his early 
years at his birthplace, where an uncle, the Rev. 
John Buckland, carried on the establishment, and at 
the age of fourteen he was sent to Winchester, his 
father's school. Here he only remained a year, and 
entered Rugby in August 1837. He remained there 
for four years, obtaining an open Ealliol scholarship 
in 1840, though he did not go up till October 1841. 
In 1840 he had also gained the prize for poetry at 
Rugby itself with Alaric at Rome, a piece which was 
immediately printed, but never reprinted by its author, 
though it is now easily obtainable in the 1896 edition 
of those poems of his which fell out of copyright at 
the seven years after his death. 

It is an observation seldom falsified, that such exer- 
cises, by poets of the higher class, display neither their 
special characteristics, nor any special characteristics at 

1 The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically 
puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kemp- 
shott," " campshed," or "-campshedding " is not a landing-stage 
(though it helps to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes 
and planks, put to guard the bank against floods, the wash of 
barges, &c. 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 5 

all. Matthew Arnold's was not one of the exceptions. 
It is very much better than most school prize poems : 
it shows the critical and scholarly character of the writer 
with very fair foreshadowing ; but it does not fore- 
shadow his poetry in the very least. It is quite free 
from the usual formal faults of a boy's verse, except 
some evidences of a deficient ear, especially for rhyme 
('•full" and "beautiful/' ''palaces" and "days'"). It 
manages a rather difficult metre (the sixain rhymed 
ababcc and ending with an Alexandrine) without too 
much of the monotony which is its special danger. 
And some of the tricks which the boy-poet has caught 
are interesting and abode with him, such as the a7ia- 
diplosis — 

" Yes, there are stories registered on high. 
Yes, there are stains Time's fingers cannot blot "; 

in which kind he was to produce some years later the 

matchless 

" Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
Still clutching the inviolable shade," 

of the Scholar- Gipsy. On the whole, the thing is 
correct but colourless ; even its melancholy is probably 
mere Byronism, and has nothing directly to do with 
the later quality of Dover Beach and Poor Matthias. 

Of Mr Arnold's undergraduate years we have un- 
luckily but little authentic record, and, as has been 
said, not one letter. The most interesting evidence 
comes from Principal Shairp's well-known lines in 



6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Balliol Scholars, 1840-1843, written, or at least pub- 
lished, many years later, in 1873 : — 

"The one wide-welcomed for a father's fame, 
Entered with free bold step that seemed to claim 
Fame for himself, nor on another lean. 

So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, 

Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, 

Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air 
Great words of Goethe, catch of Beranger, 

We see the banter sparkle in his prose. 

But knew not then the undertone that flows 
So calmly sad, through all his stately lay." 1 

Like some other persons of much distinction, and a 
great many of little or none, he " missed his first," 
in December 1844, and though he obtained, three 
months later, the consolation prize of a Fellowship (at 
Oriel, too), he made no post-graduate stay of any 
length at the university. The then very general, 
though even then not universal, necessity of taking 
orders before very long would probably in any case 
have sent him wandering; for it is clear from the 
first that his bent was hopelessly anti-clerical, and he 
was not merely too honest, but much too proud a 
man, to consent to be put in one of the priests' 
offices for a morsel of bread. It may well be doubted 
— though he felt and expressed not merely in splendid 
passages of prose and verse for public perusal, but in 
private letters quite towards the close of his life, that 

1 Gloi Dcsseray and other Poevis. By John Campbell Shairp. 
London, 1888. P. 218. 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. *J 

passionate attachment which Oxford more than any 
other place of the kind inspires — whether he would 
have been long at home there as a resident. For 
the place has at once a certain republicanism and a 
certain tyranny about its idea, which could not wholly 
suit the aspiring and restless spirit of the author of 
Switzerland. None of her sons is important to Ox- 
ford — the meanest of them has in his sonship the 
same quality as the greatest. Now it was very much 
at Mr Arnold's heart to be important, and he was 
not eager to impart or share his qualities. 

However this may be, there were ample reasons why 
he should leave the fold. The Bar (though he was actu- 
ally called and for many years went circuit as Marshal to 
his father-in-law, Mr Justice Wightman) would have 
suited him, in practice if not in principle, even less than 
the Church ; and he had no scientific leanings except a 
taste for botany. Although the constantly renewed cries 
for some not clearly defined system of public support 
for men of letters are, as a rule, absurd, there is no 
doubt that Mr Arnold was the very man for a sinecure, 
and would have justified the existence of Pipe or 
Hanaper to all reasonable men. But his political 
friends had done away with nearly all such things, and 
no one of the very few that remained fell to his lot. 
His father had died in 1842, but the son served a short 
apprenticeship to school-teaching at Rugby, then be- 
came private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, the Presi- 
dent of the Council (it is now that we first meet him ag 



8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

an epistoler), and early in 1851 was appointed by his 
chief to an inspectorship of schools. Having now a 
livelihood, he married, in June of that year, Frances 
Lucy Wightman, daughter of a judge of the Queen's 
Bench. Their first child, Thomas, was born on July 6, 
1852, and Mr Arnold was now completely estated in 
the three positions of husband, father, and inspector of 
schools, which occupied — to his great delight in the 
first two cases, not quite so in the third — most of his life 
that was not given to literature. Some not ungenerous 
but perhaps rather unnecessary indignation has been 
spent upon his "drudgery" and its scanty rewards. It 
is enough to say that few men can arrange at their 
pleasure the quantity and quality of their work, and 
that not every man, even of genius, has had his bread- 
and-butter secured for life at eight-and-twenty. 

But in the ten or twelve years which had passed since 
Alaric at Rome, literature itself had been by no means 
neglected, and in another twelvemonth after the birth of 
his first-born, Matthew Arnold had practically established 
his claim as a poet by utterances to which he made com- 
paratively small additions later, though more than half 
his life was yet to run. And he had issued one prose 
exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not 
been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge. 

These documents can hardly be said to include the 
Newdigate poem {Cromwell) of 1843 : they consist of 
The Strayed Reveller and other Poems ^ by "A.," 1S49; 
Empedocles on EtJia, and other Poems [still] by " A.," 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. 9 

1852 ; and Foems by Matthew Arnold, a new edition, 
1853 — the third consisting of the contents of the two 
earlier, with Empedocles and a few minor things 
omitted, but with very important additions, including 
Sohrab arid Rustiim, The Church of Brou^ Requiescat, 
and The Scholar- Gipsy. The contents of all three must 
be carefully considered, and the consideration may be 
prefaced by a few words on Cromwell. 

This ayoovKT/w-a, like the other, Mr Arnold never in- 
cluded in any collection of his work ; but it was printed 
at Oxford in the year of its success, and again at the 
same place, separately or with other prize poems, in 1846, 
1863, and 189 1. It may also be found in the useful 
non-copyright edition above referred to. Couched in 
the consecrated couplet, but not as of old limited to 
fifty lines, it is "good rhymes," as the elder Mr Pope 
used to say to the younger ; but a prudent taster would 
perhaps have abstained, even more carefully than in the 
case of the Alaric, from predicting a real poet in the 
author. It is probably better than six Newdigates out 
of seven at least, but it has no distinction. The young, 
but not so very young, poet — he was as old as Tennyson 
when he produced his unequal but wonderful first vol- 
ume — begins by borrowing Wordsworth's two voices of 
the mountain and the sea, shows some impression here 
and there fi-om Tennyson's own master-issue, the great 
collection of 1842, which had appeared a year before, 
ventures on an Alexandrine — 

" Between the barren mountains and the stormy sea " — 



10 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

which comes as a pleasant relief, and displays more than 
once (as he did afterwards in Tristram and Iseidf) an 
uncertain but by no means infelicitous variety of couplet 
which he never fully or fairly worked out, but left for Mr 
William Morris to employ with success many years later. 
Otherwise the thing is good, but negligible. It would 
have taken an extremely strong competition, or an ex- 
tremely incompetent examiner, to deprive it of the prize ; 
but he must have been a sanguine man who, in giving 
the author that prize, expected to receive from him re- 
turns of poetry. 

Yet they came. If we did not know that the middle 
of this century was one of the nadirs of English^ criti- 
cism, and if we did not know further that even good 
critics often go strangely wrong both in praise and in 
blame of new verse, it would be most surprising that 
The Strayed Reveller volume should have attracted so 
little attention. It is full of faults, but that is part of 

1 This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is 
neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only indi- 
cate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following sins 
of English criticism between 1840-1S60 — the slow and reluctant 
acceptance even of Tennyson, even of Thackeray ; the obstinate 
refusal to give Browning, even after Bells arid Fomegrcmates, a fair 
» hearing ; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr 
Ruskin among the younger innovators in prose ; the rejection of a 
book of erratic genius like Lavengro ; the ignoring of work of such 
combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence 
of Guinevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. For a sort of 
quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard 
Ford (himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's 
Life of the latter, i. 387. 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1G53. II 

the beauty of it. Some of those faults are those which, 
persevering, prevented Mr Arnold from attaining a 
higher position than he actually holds in poetry ; but 
no critic could know that. There is nothing here 
worse, or more necessarily fatal, than many things in 
Tennyson's 1830 and 1S32 collections: he overwent 
those, so might Mr Arnold have overgone these. And 
the promise — nay, the performance — is such as had been 
seen in no verse save Tennyson's, and the almost unno- 
ticed Browning's, for some thirty years. The title-poem, 
though it should have pleased even a severe judge, 
might have aroused uncomfortable doubts even in an 
amiable one. In the first place, its rhymelessness is 
a caprice, a will-worship. Except blank verse, every 
rhymeless metre in English has on it the curse of the 
tour de force^ of the acrobatic. Campion and Collins, 
Southey and Shelley, have done great things in it ; but 
neither Rose-cheeked Laura nor Evenings neither the 
great things in Thalaba nor the great things in Queen 
Maby can escape the charge of being caprices. And 
caprice, as some have held, is the eternal enemy of art. 
But the caprice of The Strayed Reveller does not cease 
with its rhymelessness. The rhythm and the line- 
division are also studiously odd, unnatural, paradoxical. 
Except for the " poetic diction " of putting " Goddess " 
after " Circe " instead of before it, the first stave is merely 
a prose sentence, of strictly prosaic though not inhar- 
monious rhythm. But in this stave there is no instance 
of the strangest peculiarity, and what seems to some 



12 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the worst fault of the piece, the profusion of broken-up 
decasyllabics, which sometimes suggest a very " cor- 
rupt " manuscript, or a passage of that singular stuff 
in the Caroline dramatists which is neither blank verse, 
nor any other, nor prose. Here are a few out of many 

instances — 

" Is it, then, evening 
So soon ? [/ see the night-dews 
Clustered in thick beads'], dim," etc. 

[" When the white daivii first 
Through the rough fir-planks."\ 

[" Thanks, gracio-us One ! 
Ah ! the sweet fumes again."] 

[" They see the Centaurs 
In the upper glens r\ 

One could treble these — indeed in one instance (the 
sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of eleven lines, by 
the insertion of one " and " only, becomes a smooth 
blank-verse piece of seven^ two of which are indeed 
hemistichs, and three " weak-ended," but only such as 
are frequent in Shakespeare — 

** They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand, 
His frail boat moored to a floating isle — thick-matted 
"With large-leaved {find] low-creeping melon-plants 
And the dark cucumber. 

He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting : round him. 
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves. 
The mountains ring them." 

Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it 
stand criticism of a different kind much better. Such 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. 1 3 

mighty personages as Ulysses and Circe are scarcely 
wanted as mere bystanders and " supers " to an im- 
aginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat 
promiscuousl}', a few of the possible visions of the Gods. 
There is neither classical, nor romantic, nor logical 
justification for any such mild effect of the dread Wine 
of Circe : and one is driven to the conclusion that the 
author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for 
a set of disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's 
Palace of Art and Dream of Fair Wome?i» 

But if the tide poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of 
compensation. The opening sonnet — 

" Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee " — 

is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does 
not fail to strike the note which fairly differentiates 
the Arnoldian variety of Wordsworthianism — the note 
which rings from designation to Poor Matthias, and 
which is a very curious cross between two things that 
at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the W^ords- 
worthian enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But 
of this ^ more when we have had more of its examples 
before us. The second piece in the volume must, or 
should, have struck — for there is very little evidence 
that it did strike — readers of the volume as something 
at once considerable and, in no small measure, new. 
Mycerinus, a piece of some 120 lines or so, in thirteen 
six-line stanzas and a blank-verse coda, is one of those 

1 This " undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it. 



14 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

characteristic poems of this century, which are neither 
mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor 
substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least 
an attempt at a beginning, middle, and end. They 
attempt rather situations than stories, rather facets than 
complete bodies of thought, or description, or character. 
They supply an obvious way of escape for the Romantic 
tendency which does not wish to break wholly with clas- 
sical tradition ; and above all they admit of indulgence 
in that immense variety which seems to have become 
one of the chief devices of modern art, attempting the 
compliances necessary to gratify modern taste. 

The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King 
Mycerinus, his indignation at the sentence of death 
in six years as a recompense for his just rule, and 
his device of lengthening his days by revelling all 
night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promis- 
ing subject. The foolish good sense of Mr Toots 
would probably observe — and justly — that before six 
years, or six months, or even six days were over King 
Mycerinus must have got very sleepy ; and the philo- 
sophic mind would certainly recall the parallel of 
Cleobis and Biton as to the best gift for man. Mr 
Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The stanza- 
part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains 
very fine poetry, and " the note " rings again throughout 
it, especially in the couplet — 

"And prayers, and gifts, and tears, are fruitless all, 
A7id the night waxes, and the shadows fall." 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 1 5 

The blank-verse tail-piece is finer still in execution ; 
it is, with the still finer companion-^^^^ of Sohrab and 
Rustum^ the author's masterpiece in the kind, and it 
is, Hke that, an early and consummate example of Mr 
Arnold's favourite device of finishing without a finish, 
of '"'playing out the audience," so to speak, with 
something healing and reconciling, description, simile, 
what not, to relieve the strain of his generally sad 
philosophy and his often melancholy themes. 

One may less admire, despite its famous and often- 
quoted line, 

" Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole," 

the sonnet To a Friend^ praising Homer and Epictetus 
and Sophocles, for it seems to some to have a smatch of 
priggishness. Nor am I one of those who think very 
highly of the much longer Sick King in Bokha?'a 
which (with a fragment of an Antigone, whereof more 
hereafter) follows, as this sonnet precedes, The Strayed 
Reveller itself. There is *' the note," again, and I dare- 
say the orientalism has the exactness of colour on 
which, as we know from the Letters, Mr Arnold prided 
himself. Yet the handling of the piece seems to me 
prohx and uncertain, and the drift either very obscure 
or somewhat unimportant. But about the Shakespeare 
sonnet which follows there can be no controversy among 
the competent. " Almost adequate " is in such a case 
the highest praise ; and it must be given. 

The companions of this sonnet are respectable, but 



1 6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

do not deserve much warmer words; and then we turn 
to a style of poem remarkably different from anything 
which the author had yet published and from most of 
his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the 
batch of poems called in the later collected editions 
Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called 
On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, 
and with no indication of connection. The first of 
its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a 
Tender Leave-takitig, It applies both the note of 
thought which has been indicated, and the quality of 
style which had already disengaged itself, to the com- 
monest — the greatest — theme of poetry, but to one 
which this poet had not yet tried — to Love. Let 
it be remembered that the thought has the cast of 
a strictly pessimist quietism — that the style aims, if 
it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the 
simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and 
quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There 
is, however, by no means any great austerity in the 
tone : on the contrary the refrain — 

" Ere the parting kiss be dry, 
Quick ! thy tablets. Memory ! " — 

approaches the luscious. It is not easy to decide, and 
it is perhaps in both senses impertinent to speculate, 
whether the " Marguerite " (whose La Tour-like portrait 
is drawn in this piece with such relish, and who is so 
philosophically left to her fate by her lover on the 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. Ij 

Terrace at Berne later) had any live original. She 
seems a little more human in some ways than most of 
those cloud-Junos of the poets, the heroines of sonnet- 
sequence and song-string. She herself has a distinct 
touch of philosophy, anticipating with nonchalant resig- 
nation the year's severance, and with equally nonchalant 
anticipation the time when 

*' Some day next year I shall be, 
Entering heedless, kissed by thee." 

Her wooer paints her with gusto, but scarcely with 
ardour ; and ends with the boding note — 

" Yet, if little stays with man, 
Ah ! retain we all we can ! " — 

seeming to be at least as doubtful of his own constancy 
as of hers. Nor do we meet her again in the volume. 
The well-known complementary pieces which make up 
Switzerland were either not written, or held back. 

The inferior but interesting Modern Sappho^ almost 
the poet's only experiment in "Moore-ish" method and 
melody — 

" They are gone — all is still ! Foolish heart, dost thou quiver ? " — 

is a curiosity rather than anything else. The style is 
ill suited to the thought ; besides, Matthew Arnold, 
a master at times of blank verse, and of the statelier 
stanza, was less often an adept at the lighter and 
more rushing Ijrical measures. He is infinitely more 
at home in the beautiful New Sirens, which, for what 



1 8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

reason it is difficult to discover, he never reprinted 
till many years later, partly at Mr Swinburne's most 
judicious suggestion. The scheme is trochaic, and Mr 
Arnold (deriving beyond all doubt inspiration from 
Keats) was happier than most poets with that charming 
but difficult foot. The note is the old one of yearning 
rather than passionate melancholy, applied in a new 
way and put most clearly, though by no means most 
poetically, in the lines 

" Can men worship the wan features, 
The sunk eyes, the wailing tone, 
Of unsphered, discrowned creatures. 

Souls as little godlike as their own ? " 

The answer is, " No," of course ; but, as Mr Traill 
informed Mr Arnold many years later, we knew that 
before, and it is distressing to be told it, as we are a 
httle later, with a rhyme of "dawning" and "morning." 
Yet the poem is a very beautiful one — in some ways 
the equal of its author's best up to this time ; at least 
he had yet done nothing except the Shakespeare sonnet 
equal to the splendid stanza beginning — 

" And we too, from upland valleys; " 

and the cry of the repentant sirens, punished as they 
had sinned — 

" ' Come,' you say, ' the hours are dreary.' " 

Yet the strong Tennysonian influence (which the poet 
rather ungraciously kicked against in his criticism) shows 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. I9 

itself here also ; and we know perfectly well that the 
good lines — 

" When the first rose flush was steeping 
All the frore peak's awful crown " — 

are but an unconscious reminiscence of the great ones — 

" And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn, 
God made himself an awful rose of dawn." 

He kept this level, though here following not Tenny- 
son or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and 
elaborate lyrics. The Voice, To Fatcsta, and Stagirms, 
fine things, if somehow a litde suggestive of inability 
on their author's part fully to meet the demands of the 
forms he attempts — " the note," in short, expressed practi- 
cally as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants 
but a very little to be a perfect expression of the ob- 
stinate questionings of the century ; and yet wanting a 
little, it wants so much ! Others, To a Gipsy Child and 
The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this) 
are but faint Wordsworthian echoes, and thus we come 
to The Forsake?! Merman. 

It is, I believe, not so "correct" as it once was to 
admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at 
least the correctness which varies with fashion. The 
Forsaken Merma?t is not a perfect poem — it has lon- 
gueurs, though it is not long ; it has those inadequacies, 
those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly 
characteristic of its author ; and his elaborate simplicity, 
though more at home here than in some other places, 



20 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem 
— one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place 
in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which 
every true lover of poetry is provided, though he in- 
herits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its 
pathos ; I should be sorry for any one who fails to per- 
ceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and 
the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) 
of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own 
charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those 
metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest 
poetry, in the sudden change from the slower move- 
ments of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker 
sweep of the famous conclusion — 

*' The salt tide rolls seaward, 
Lights shine from the town " — 

to 

** She left lonely for ever 
The kings of the sea." 

Here the poet's poetry has come to its own. 

In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and 
has one exceedingly fine stanza : — 

" Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, 
And faint the city gleams ; 
Rare the lone pastoral huts — marvel not thou ! 
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, 
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams ; 
Alone the sun arises, and alone 
Spring the great streams." 

But Resignation, the last poem in the book, goes far 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 21 

higher. Again, it is too long ; and as is not the 
case in the Merman, or even in The Strayed Reveller 
itself, the getieral drift of the poem, the allegory (if 
it be an allegory) of the two treadings of "the self- 
same road" with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily 
obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much 
trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the splendid 
passage beginning — 

" The Poet to whose mighty heart," 
and ending — 

" His sad lucidity of soul," 

has far more interest than concerns the mere intro- 
duction, in this last line itself, of one of the famous 
Arnoldian catchwords of later years. It has far 
more than Hes even in its repetition, with fuller de- 
tail, of what has been called the author's main poetic 
note of half-melancholy contemplation of Hfe. It 
has, once more, the interest of poetry — of poetical 
presentation, which is independent of any subject or 
intention, which is capable of being adapted perhaps 
to all, certainly to most, which lies in form, in sound, 
in metre, in imagery, in language, in suggestion — 
rather than in matter, in sense, in definite purpose 
or scheme. 

It is one of the heaviest indictments against the 
criticism of the mid-nineteenth century that this re- 
markable book — the most remarkable first book of 
verse that appeared between Tennyson's and Brown- 



22 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

ing's in the early thirties and The Defence of Guine- 
vere in 1858 — seems to have attracted next to no 
notice at all. It received neither the ungenerous and 
purblind, though not wholly unjust, abuse which in 
the long-run did so much good to Tennyson him- 
self, nor the absurd and pernicious bleatings of praise 
which have greeted certain novices of late years. It 
seems to have been simply let alone, or else made 
the subject of quite insignificant comments. 

In the same year (1849) Mr Arnold was repre- 
sented in the Examiner of July 21 by a sonnet to 
the Hungarian nation, which he never included in 
any book, and which remained peacefully in the dust- 
bin till a reference in his Letters quite recently set 
the ruthless reprinter on its track. Except for an 
ending, itself not very good, the thing is quite value- 
less : the author himself says to his mother, " it is 
not worth much." And three years passed before he 
followed up his first volume with a second, which 
should still more clearly have warned the intelligent 
critic that here was somebody, though such a critic 
would not have been guilty of undue hedging if he 
had professed himself still unable to decide whether 
a new great poet had arisen or not. 

This volume was Enipedocles on Etna a?id other 
Poems, [still] By A. London: Fellowes, 1852. It 
contained two attempts — the title-piece and Tris- 
tra?n and Iseult — much longer and more ambitious 
than anything that the poet had yet done, and thirty- 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1853. 23 

three smaller poems, of which two — Destiny and 
Courage — were never reprmted. It was again very 
unequal — perhaps more so than the earlier volume, 
though it went higher and oftener high. But the 
author became dissatisfied with it very shortly after 
its appearance in the month of October, and withdrew 
it when, as is said, less than fifty copies had been sold. 
One may perhaps not impertinently doubt whether the 
critical reason, v. infra — in itself a just and penetrat- 
ing one, as well as admirably expressed — which, in the 
Preface of the 1S53 collection, the poet gave for its 
exclusion (save in very small part) from that volume 
tells the whole truth. At any rate, I think most 
good judges quarrel with Empedodes, not because the 
situation is unmanageable, but because the poet has 
not managed it. The contrast, in dramatic trio, of 
the world-worn and disappointed philosopher, the prac- 
tical and rather prosaic physician, and the fresh gifts 
and unspoilt gusto of the youthful poet, is neither 
impossible nor unpromising. Perhaps, as a situation, 
it is a little nearer than Mr Arnold quite knew to 
that of Paracelsus^ and it is handled with less force 
if with more clearness than Browning's piece. But 
one does not know what is more amiss with it than 
is amiss with most of its author's longer pieces — 
namely, that neither story nor character-drawing was 
his forte, that the dialogue is too colourless, and that 
though the description is often charming, it is seldom 
masterly. As before, there are jarring rhymes — - 



24 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

"school" and "oracle," "Faun" and "scorn." Em- 

pedocles himself is sometimes dreadfully tedious; but 

the part of Callicles throughout is lavishly poetical. 

Not merely the show passages — that which the Roman 

father, 

" Though young, intolerably severe," 

saved from banishment and retained by itself in the 1853 
volume, as Cadmus and Harmonia, and the beautiful 
lyrical close, — but the picture of the highest wooded 
glen on Etna, and the Flaying of Marsyas, are de- 
lightful things. 

Tristram and Iseult^ with fewer good patches, has a 
greater technical interest. It is only one, but it is the 
most remarkable, of the places where we perceive in Mr 
Arnold one of the most curious of the notes of transi- 
tion-poets. They will not frankly follow another's metri- 
cal form, and they cannot strike out a new one for 
themselves. In this piece the author — most attractively 
to the critic, if not always quite satisfactorily to the 
reader — makes for, and flits about, half-a-dozen different 
forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable 
of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or 
Byron's ; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo 
kind; and once at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, 
which catches the ear and cHngs to the memory for a 
lifetime — 

" What voices are these on the clear night air ? 
What lights in the court ? What steps on the stair? " 

But the most interesting experiment by far is in the 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 855. 25 

rhymed heroic, which appears fragmentarily in the first 
two parts and substantively in the third. The interest 
of this, which (one cannot but regret it) Mr Arnold did 
not carry further, relapsing on a stiff if stately blank 
verse, is not merely intrinsic, but both retrospective 
and prospective. It is not the ordinary " stopped " 
eighteenth-century couplet at all ; nor the earlier one of 
Drayton and Daniel. It is the "enjambed," very 
mobile, and in the right hands admirably fluent and 
adaptable couplet, which William Browne and Cham- 
berlayne practised in the early and middle seventeenth 
century, which Leigh Hunt revived and taught to 
Keats, and of which, later than Mr Arnold himself, Mr 
William Morris was such an admirable practitioner. Its ■ 
use here is decidedly happy ; and the whole of this part 
shows in Mr Arnold a temporary Romantic impulse, 
which again we cannot but regret that he did not obey. 
The picture-work of the earlier lines is the best he ever 
did. The figure of Iseult with the White Hands stands 
out with the right Prae-Raphaelite distinctness and 
charm; and the story of Merlin and Vivian, with which, 
in the manner so dear to him, he diverts the attention 
of the reader from the main topic at the end, is beauti- 
fully told. For attaching quality on something like a 
large scale I should put this part of Tristram a?id Iseult 
much above both Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead ; 
but the earlier parts are not worthy of it, and the whole, 
like Empedocles, is something of a failure, though both 
poems afford ample consolation in passages. 



26 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

The smaller pieces, however, could have saved the 
volume had their larger companions been very much 
weaker. The Memorial Verses on Wordsworth (pub- 
lished first in Fraser) have taken their place once for 
all. If they have not the poetical beauty in different 
ways of Carew on Donne, of Dryden on Oldham, 
even of Tickell upon Addison, of Adonais above all, 
of Wordsworth's own beautiful Effusion on the group 
of dead poets in 1834, they do not fall far short 
even in this respect. And for adequacy of meaning, 
not unpoetically expressed, they are almost supreme. 
If Mr Arnold's own unlucky and maimed definition 
of poetry as '^ a criticism of life " had been true, 
they would be poetry in quintessence ; and, as it is, 
they are poetry. 

Far more so is the glorious Summer Nighty which 
came near the middle of the book. There is a cheer- 
ing doctrine of mystical optimism which will have it that 
a sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails 
of at least one moment of consummate realisation and 
enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew 
Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night Whether 
that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection 
of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a 
creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or 
undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here 
argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of 
it rings through the verse of these years. And here it 
rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. 2/ 

lips are touched at last : the eyes are thoroughly opened 
to see what the lips shall speak : the brain almost uncon- 
sciously frames and fills the adequate and inevitable 
scheme. And, as always at these right poetic moments, 
the minor felicities follow the major. The false rhymes 
are nowhere ; the imperfect phrases, the Httle sham 
simplicities or pedantries hide themselves ; and the poet 
is free, from the splendid opening landscape through 
the meditative exposition, and the fine picture of the 
shipwreck, to the magnificent final invocation of the 
" Clearness divine ! " 

His freedom, save once, is not so unquestionably ex- 
hibited in the remarkable group of poems — the future 
constituents of the Suntzerlajid group, but still not 
classified under any special head — which in the orig- 
inal volume chiefly follow E7)iJ)edodes^ with the batch 
later called " Faded Leaves " to introduce them. It 
is, perhaps, if such things were worth attempting at all, 
an argument for supposing some real undercurrent of 
fact or feehng in them, that they are not grouped at 
their first appearance, and that some of them are 
perhaps designedly separated from the rest. Even the 
name "Marguerite" does not appear in A Fa?'ewell ; 
though nobody who marked as well as read, could fail 
to connect it with the To my Friends of the fornier 
volume. We are to suppose, it would appear, that 
the twelvemonth has passed, and that Marguerite's an- 
ticipation of the renewed kiss is fulfilled in the first 
stanzas. But the lover's anticipation, too, is ful- 



28 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

filled, though as usual not quite as he made it; he 
wearies of his restless and yet unmasterful passion ; 
he rather muses and morals in his usual key on 
the " way of a man with a maid " than complains or 
repines. And then we go off for a time from Mar- 
guerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the 
famous " Ohermaim " stanzas, a variation of the Words- 
worth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little im- 
potent — the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I 
think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." 
Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, 
though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible — 
pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the " fierce 
indignation," mere whining compared with the great 
ironic despair. As for Consolation, which in form as in 
matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I 
must say, at the risk of the charge of Philistinism, that I 
cannot see why most of it should not have been printed 
as prose. In fact, it would be a very bold and astonish- 
ingly ingenious person who, not knowing the original, 
perceived any verse-division in this — 

" The bleak, stern hour, whose severe moments I would anni- 
hilate, is passed by others in warmth, light, joy." 

Nor perhaps can very much be said for some of 
the other things. The sonnet afterwards entitled The 
World^s Triumphs is not strong ; The Second Best is but 
" a chain of extremely valuable thoughts " ; Revolutio?i 
a conceit. The Youth of Nature and The Youth of 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 29 

Man do but take up less musically the threnos for 
Wordsworth. But Morality is both rhyme and poetry ; 
Progress is at least rhyme ; and The Future, though 
rhymeless again, is the best of all Mr Arnold's wayward- 
nesses of this kind. It is, however, in the earlier division 
of the smaller poems — those which come between Eni- 
pedocles and Tristram — that the interest is most concen- 
trated, and that the best thing — better as far as its sub- 
ject is concerned even than the Summer Night — appears. 
For though all does Jiot depend upon the subject, yet of 
two poems equally good in other ways, that which has 
the better subject will be the better. Here we have the 
bulk of the " Marguerite " or Switzerland poems — in 
other words, we leave the windy vagaries of mental in- 
digestion and come to the real things — Life and Love. 

The Piver does not name any one, though the "arch 
eyes " identify Marguerite ; and Excuse, Indifference, and 
Too Late are obviously of the company. But none of 
these is exactly of the first class. We grow warmer 
with On The Rhine, containing, among other things, 
the good distich — 

" Eyes too expressive to be blue, 
Too lovely to be grey " ; 

on which Mr Swinburne gave a probably unconscious 
scholion as well as variation in his own — 

" Those eyes, the greenest of things blue, 
The bluest of things grey." 

The intense pathos, which the poet could rarely 



30 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

" let himself go " sufficiently to reach, together with 

the seventeenth-century touch which in English not 

unfrequently rewards the self-sacrifice necessary to 

scholarly poets in such abandonment, appears in 

Longing; The Lake takes up the faint thread of story 

gracefully enough ; and Parting does the same with 

more importance in a combination, sometimes very 

effective, of iambic couplets and anapaestic strophes, 

and with a touch of direct if not exalted nature in its 

revelation of that terrible thing, retrospective jealousy, 

in the lover. Woe to the man who allows himself to 

think — 

" To the lips ! ah ! of others 

Those lips have been pressed, 
And others, ere I was, 

Were clasped to that breast," 

and who does not at once exorcise the demon with 

the fortunately all-potent spell of Bocca bacciata and 

the rest 1 Abse?ice and Destiny show him in the same 

Purgatory ; and it is impossible to say that he has 

actually escaped in the crowning poem of the series 

— the crowning-point perhaps of his poetry, the piece 

beginning 

" Yes ! in the sea of life enisled." 

It is neither uninteresting nor unimportant that this 
exquisite piece, by a man's admiration of which (for 
there are some not wholly lost, who do not admire 
it) his soundness in the CathoHc Faith of poetry may 
be tested, perhaps as well as by any other, has borne 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. 3 1 

more than one or two titles. It is in the 1852 
volume, To Marguerite : Jn returning a volume of the 
letters of Ortis. In 1853 it became Isolatiofi, its best 
name; and later it took the much less satisfactory 
one of To Marguerite — co?itifiued, being annexed to 
another. 

Isolation is preferable for many reasons; not least 
because the actual IMarguerite appears nowhere in 
the poem, and, except in the opening monosyllable, 
can hardly be said to be even rhetorically addressed. 
The poet's affection — it is scarcely passion — is there, 
but in transcendence : he meditates more than he 
feels. And that function of the riddle of the painful 
earth which Lucretius, thousands of years ago, put in 
his grim Neqiiicquam I which one of Mr Arnold's own 
contemporaries formulated with less magnificence and 
more popularity, but still with music and truth in 
Strangers Yet — here receives almost its final poetical 
expression. The image — the islands in the sea — is 
capitally projected in the first stanza; it is exquisitely 
amplified in the second ; the moral comes with due 
force in the third ; and the whole winds up with 
one of the great poetic phrases of the century — one 
of the "jewels five [literally five!] words long" of Eng- 
lish verse — a phrase complete and final, with epithets in 
unerring cumulation — 

" The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." 

Huma?i Life, no ill thing in itself, reads a little 



32 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

weakly after Isolation ; but Despondency is a pretty 
piece of melancholy, and, with a comfortable stool, 
will suit a man well. In the sonnet, Whe7i I shall 
be divorced^ Mr Arnold tried the Elizabethan vein 
with less success than in his Shakespeare piece ; and 
Self- Deception and Lines writte?i by a Death-Bed^ 
with some beauty have more monotony. The closing 
lines of the last are at the same time the moral of 
the book and the formula of the Arnoldian " note " — 

" Calm 's not life's crown, though calm is well. 
'T is all perhaps which man acquires, 
But 't is not what our youth desires," 

Again, we remember Mr Traill's parody - remon- 
strance thirty years later, and again we may think that 
the condemnation which Mr Arnold himself was soon 
to pronounce upon Einpedocles is rather disastrously 
far-reaching, while even this phrase is a boomerang. 
Musical and philosophical despair is one of the in- 
numerable strings of the poetic lyre ; but 't is not 
what our youth, or our age either, desires for a 
monochord. 

The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not 
long delayed. Whatever may have been his opinion 
as to the reception of the two volumes " by A," he 
made up his mind, a year after the issue and withdrawal 
of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, 
and containing, besides a full selection from the other 
two, fresh specimens of the greatest importance. In 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 853. 33 

the two former there had been no avowed "pur- 
pose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on 
principle, the important E?npedocles as well as some 
minor things being omitted : not merely did some 
of the new numbers, especially Sohrab and Rustu77i, 
directly and intentionally illustrate the poet's theories, 
but those theories themselves were definitely put in a 
Preface^ which is the most important critical document 
issued in England for something like a generation, and 
which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no 
competitors in English, except some work of Dryden's 
and some of Wordsworth's. 

Beginning with his reasons for discarding Einpedocles^ 
reasons which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but 
too important not to require citation at least in a note,^ 
he passes suddenly to the reasons which were not his, 
and of which he makes a good rhetorical starting-point 
for his main course. The bad critics of that day had 
promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till 
a time within the memory of most men who have 
reached middle life, though the error has since in the 
usual course given way to others — that " the Poet 

^ " What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which, 
though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived ? They are 
those in which the suffering finds no vent in action ; in which a 
continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by in- 
cident, hope, or resistance ; in which there is everything to be en- 
dured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably 
something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. 
When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic ; the 
representation of them in poetry is painful also." 

C 



^4 MAtTHiEW Arnold. 

must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects 
from matters of present import." This was the genuine 
" 7}Wi'-z;.-all-the-works-of-Thucydides " fallacy of the mid- 
nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, 
the heartfelt motto of Philistia — as Philistia then was. 
For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have 
always with us, ready, as it was once said, " to bestow its 
freedom in pinchbeck boxes " on its elect. 

This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low 
at once; but unluckily his swashing blow carries him 
with it, and he falls headlong into fresh error himself 
"What," he asks very well, "are the eternal objects of 
Poetry, among all nations and at all times ? " And he 
answers — equally well, though not perhaps with impreg- 
nable logical completeness and accuracy — "They are 
actions, human actions ; possessing an inherent interest 
in themselves, and which are to be communicated in 
an interesting manner by the art of the Poet." Here 
he tells the truth, but not the whole truth ; he should 
have added " thoughts and feelings "to " actions," or he 
deprives Poetry of half her realm. But he is so far 
sufficient against his Harapha (for at that date there 
were no critical Goliaths about). Human action does 
possess an "inherent," an "eternal," poetical interest 
and capacity in itself. That interest, that capacity, is 
incapable of " exhaustion " — nay (as Mr Arnold, though 
with bad arguments as well as good, urges later), it is, on 
the whole, a likelier subject for the poet when it is old, 
because it is capable of being grasped and presented 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1853. 35 

more certainly. But the defender hastens to indulge in 
more than one of those dangerous sallies from his 
trenches which have been fatal to so many heroes. He 
proclaims that the poet cannot " make an intrinsically 
inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent 
one by his treatment of it," forgetting that, until the 
action is presented, we do not know whether it is " in- 
ferior " or not. He asks, " What modern poem presents 
personages as interesting as Achilles, Prometheus, Cly- 
temnestra. Dido ? " unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of 
the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the 
classics quite as well as he does, will cheerfully take up 
his challenge at any weapons he likes to name, and with 
a score of instances for his quartette. It is true that, 
thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists, 
he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the 
respectable Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic 
Cnilde Harold, the creature called " Jocelyn," and the 
shadowy or scrappy personages of the Excursion^ to 
match against his four. But this is manifestly unfair. 
To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage- 
makers is only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on 
which W^amba or Launcelot Goubo shall put the gloss for 
us). Nay, even those to whom Goethe and Byron are 
not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that Mephis- 
topheles — that even Faust himself — is a much more 
" interesting " person than the sulky invulnerable son 
of Thetis, while Gulnare, Parisina, and others are not 
much worse than Dido. But these are mere details. 



36 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

The main purpose of the Preface is to assert in the most 
emphatic manner the Aristotehan (or partly Aristotehan) 
doctrine that " All depends on the subject," and to con- 
nect the assertion with a further one, of which even less 
proof is offered, that "the Greeks understood this far 
better than we do," and that they were also the unap- 
proachable masters of " the grand style." These posi- 
tions, which, to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained 
unflinchingly to his dying day, are supported, not exactly 
by argument, but by a great deal of ingenious and 
audacious illustration and variation of statement, even 
Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their 
wicked refusal to subordinate " expression " to choice 
and conception of subject. The merely Philistine mod- 
ernism is cleverly set up again that it may be easily 
smitten down ; the necessity of Criticism, and of the 
study of the ancients in order to it, is most earnestly 
and convincingly championed ; and the piece ends with 
its other famous sentence about " the wholesome 
regulative laws of Poetry " and their " eternal enemy, 
Caprice." 

As Mr Arnold's critical position will be considered 
as a whole later, it would be waste of time to say 
very much more of this first manifesto of his. It 
need only be observed that he might have been 
already, as he often was later, besought to give some 
little notion of what "the gra?2d style^' was; that, 
true and sound as is much of the Preface, it is not 
a little exposed to the damaging retort, " Yes : this 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 37 

is your doxy, and she seems fair to you, no doubt; 
but so does ours seem fair to us." Moreover, the 
"all-depends-on-the-subject" doctrine here, as always, 
swerves from one fatal difficulty. If, in what pleases 
poetically, poetical expression is ahvays present, while 
in only some of v.'hat pleases poetically is the subject 
at the required height, is it not illogical to rule 
out, as the source of the poetic pleasure, that which 
is always present in favour of that which is sometimes 
absent ? 

We know from the Letters — and we should have 
been able to divine without them — that Sohrab and 
Rustum^ the first in order, the largest in bulk, and 
the most ambitious in scheme of the poems which 
appeared for the first time in the new volume, was 
written in direct exemplification of the theories of 
the Preface. The theme is old, and though not 
" classical " in place, is thoroughly so in its nature, 
being the story of a combat between a father and a 
son, who know not each other till too late, of the 
generosity of the son, of the final triumph of the 
father, of the anagiwrisis^ with the resignation of the 
vanquished and the victor's despair. The medium 
is blank verse, of a partly but not wholly Miltonic 
stamp, very carefully written, and rising at the end 
into a really magnificent strain, with the famous pic- 
ture of " the majestic river " Oxus floating on regard- 
less of these human v/oes, to where the stars 
** Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 



38 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Even here, it is true, the Devil's Advocate may ask 
whether this, Hke the Mycerinus close, that of Em- 
pedocles, and others, especially one famous thing, to 
which we shall come presently, is not more of a 
purple tail - patch, a " tag," a " curtain," than of a 
legitimate and integral finale. It is certain that 
Mr Arnold, following the Greeks in intention no 
doubt, if not quite so closely as he intended, was 
very fond of these "curtains" — these little rhetorical 
reconciliations and soothings for the reader. But this 
is the most in place of any of them, and certainly 
the noblest tirade that its author has left. 

Most of the new poems here are at a level but 
a little lower than this part of Sohrab afid Rustum^ 
while some of them are even above it as wholes. 
Fhilomela is beautiful, in spite of the obstinate will- 
worship of its unrhymed Pindaric : the Stanzas to 
the MejHory of Edward Quillinan are really pathetic, 
though shghtly irritating in their " sweet simplicity " ; 
and if Thekla's Answer is nothing particular. The 
Neckaft nothing but a weaker doublet of the Merman^ 
A Dt'eam is noteworthy in itself, and as an outlier 
of the Marguerite group. Then we have three things, 
of which the first is, though unequal, great at the 
close, while the other two rank with the greatest 
things Mr Arnold ever did. These are The Church 
of Brou^ Requiescat^ and The Scholar-Gipsy. 

If, as no critic ever can, the critic could thoroughly 
discover the secret of the inequality of The Church 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 39 

of B roll ^ he might, Hke the famous pedant, "put away" 
Mr Arnold " fully conjugated in his desk." The poem 
is in theme and scheme purely Romantic, and "nine- 
teenth century" in its looking back to a simple and 
pathetic story of the Middle Age — love, bereavement, 
and pious resignation. It is divided into three parts. 
The first, in trochaic ballad metre, telling the story, 
is one of the poet's weakest things. You may oft 
see as good in Helen Maria Williams and the Delia 
Cruscans. The second, describing the church where 
the duke and duchess sleep, in an eight-line stanza 
of good fashion, is satisfactory but nothing more. 
And then the third, after a manner hardly paralleled 
save in Crashaw's FIai/n7ig Hearty breaks from twaddle 
and respectable verse into a rocket -rush of heroic 
couplets, scattering star-showers of poetry all over and 
round the bewildered reader. It is artifice rather 
than art, perhaps, to lisp and drawl, that, when you 
do speak out, your speech may be the more effective. 
But hardly anything can make one quarrel with such 
a piece of poetry as that beginning — 

" So rest, for ever rest, O princely pair!" 

and ending — 

"The rustle of the eternal rain of Love." 

On the other hand, in Reqidescat there is not a false 
note, unless it be the dubious word "vasty" in the 
last line ; and even that may shelter itself under the 



40 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

royal mantle of Shakespeare. The poet has here 
achieved what he too often fails in, the triple union of 
simplicity, pathos, and (in the best sense) elegance. 
The dangerous repetitions of "roses, roses," "tired, 
tired," &c., come all right ; and above all he has the flexi- 
bility and quiver of metre that he too often lacks. His 
trisyllabic interspersions — the leap in the vein that 
makes iambic verse alive and passionate — are as happy 
as they can be, and the relapse into the uniform dis- 
syllabic gives just the right contrast. He must be 
Tj 6r)piov Tf deo<; — and whichever he be, he is not to be 
envied — who can read Requiescat for the first or the 
fiftieth time without mist in the eyes and without a 
catch in the voice. 

But the greatest of these — the greatest by far — is The 
Scholar-Gipsy. I have read — and that not once only, 
nor only in the works of unlettered and negligible 
persons — expressions of irritation at the local Oxonian 
colour. This is surely amazing. One may not be an 
Athenian, and never have been at Athens, yet be able 
to enjoy the local colour of the Phcedrus. One may 
not be an Italian, and never have been in Italy, yet 
find the Divina Commedia made not teasing but in- 
finitely vivid and agreeable by Dante's innumerable re- 
ferences to his country, Florentine and general. That 
some keener thrill, some nobler gust, may arise in 
the reading of the poem to those who have actually 
watched 

"The line of festal light ia Christ Church Hall" 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1 85 3. 41 

from above Hinksey, who know the Fyfield elm in 
May, and have "trailed their fingers in the stripling 
Thames " at Bablockhithe, — may be granted. But in 
the name of Bandusia and of Gargarus, what offence 
can these things give to any worthy wight who by his 
ill luck has not seen them with eyes ? The objection 
is so apt to suggest a suspicion, as illiberal almost as 
itself, that one had better not dwell on it. 

Let us hope that there are after all few to whom it 
has presented itself — that most, even if they be not sons 
by actual matriculation of Oxford, feel that, as of other 
" Cities of God," they are citizens of her by spiritual 
adoption, and by the welcome accorded in all such cities 
to God's children. But if the scholar had been an 
alumnus of Timbuctoo, and for Cumnor and Godstow 
had been substituted strange places in -wa and -ja^ I 
cannot think that, even to those who are of Oxford, the 
intrinsic greatness of this noble poem would be much 
affected, though it might lose a separable charm. For 
it has everything — a sufficient scheme, a definite mean- 
ing and purpose, a sustained and adequate command 
of poetical presentation, and passages and phrases of 
the most exquisite beauty. Although it begins as a 
pastoral, the mere traditional and conventional frippery 
of that form is by no means so prominent in it as in 
the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and 
sequel TJiyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet 
throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main 
dangers which so constantly beset him — too great stiff- 



42 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

ness and too great simplicity. - His " Graian " personi- 
fication is not overdone ; his landscape is exquisite ; the 
stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, 
with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnold- 
ian "note" — the special form of the maladie du Steele 
which, as we have seen, this poet chooses to celebrate 
— acquires for once the full and due poetic expression 
and music, both symphonic and in such special 
clangours as the never-to-be-too-often-quoted distich — 

" Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
Still clutching the inviolable shade " — 

v/hich marks the highest point of the composition. 
The only part on which there may be some difference 
between admirers is the final simile of the Tyrian trader. 
This finishes off the piece in nineteen lines, of which 
the poet was — and justly — proud, which are quite ad- 
mirable by themselves, but which cannot perhaps pro- 
duce any very clear evidences of right to be where they 
are. No ingenuity can work out the parallel between 
the ''uncloudedly joyous" scholar who is bid avoid the 
palsied, diseased e?ifanfs du Steele, and the grave Tyrian 
who was indignant at the competition of the merry 
Greek, and shook out more sail to seek fresh markets. 
It is, once more, simply an instance of Mr Arnold's 
fancy for an end-note of relief, of cheer, of pleasant 
contrast. On his own most rigid principles, I fear it 
would have to go as a mere sewn-on patch of purple : 
on mine, I welcome it as one of the most engaging 



LIFE AND V/ORK TO 1 85 3. 43 

passages of a poem delightful throughout, and at its 
very best the equal of anything that was written in its 
author's lifetime, fertile as that was in poetry. 

He himself, though he was but just over thirty when 
this poem appeared, and though his life was to last for 
a longer period than had passed since his birth to 1853, 
was to make few further contributions to poetry itself. 
The reasons of this comparative sterility are interesting, 
and not quite so obvious as they may appear. It is 
true, indeed, — it is an arch-truth which has been too 
rarely recognised, — that something like complete idle- 
ness, or at any rate complete freedom from regular 
mental occupation, is necessary to the man who is to do 
poetic work great in quality and in quantity at once. 
The hardest occupation — and Mr Arnold's, though 
hard, was not exactly that — will indeed leave a man 
sufficient time, so far as mere time is concerned, to turn 
out as much verse as the most fertile of poets has ever 
produced. But then that will scarcely do. The Muses 
are feminine — and it has been observed that you cannot 
make up even to the most amiable and reasonable of that 
sex for refusing to attend to her at the minute when she 
wants you^ by devoting even hours, even days, when you 
are at leisure for her. To put the thing more seriously, 
though perhaps not more truly, the human brain is not 
so constituted that you can ride or drive or " train " from 
school to school, examining as you go, for half-a-dozen 
or half-a-score hours a-day, or that you can devote the 
same time to the weariest and dreariest of all businesses, 



44 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the reading of hundreds of all but identical answers to 
the same stock questions, and yet be fresh and fertile 
for imaginative composition. The nearest contradictory 
instances to this proposition are those of Scott and 
Southey, and they . are, in more ways than one or two, 
very damaging instances — exceptions which, in a rather 
horrible manner, do prove the rule. To less harassing, 
and especially less peremptory, work than Mr Arnold's, 
as well as far more literary in kind, Scott sacrificed the 
minor Uterary graces, Southey immolated the choicer 
fruits of genius which he undoubtedly possessed the 
power of producing ; and both " died from the top 
downward." 

But there was something more than this. Mr 
Arnold's poetic ambition, as v;e have seen, did not aim 
at very long and elaborate works. His forte was the 
occasional piece — which might still suggest itself and 
be completed — which, as we shall see, did sometimes 
suggest itself and was completed — in the intervals, the 
holidays, the relaxations of his task. And if these lucid 
and lucent intervals, though existent, were so rare, their 
existence and their rarity together suggest that some- 
thin": more than untoward circumstance is to blame for 
the fact that they did not show themselves oftener. A 
full and constant tide of inspiration is imperative ; it 
will not be denied ; it may kill the poet if he cannot or 
will not give vent to it, but it will not be patient of 
repression — quietly content to appear now and then, 
even on such occasions as the deaths of a Clough and 



LIFE AND WORK TO 1853. 45 

a Stanley. Nor is it against charity or liberality, while 
it is in the highest degree consonant with reason and 
criticism, to infer that Mr Arnold's poetic vein was not 
very full-blooded, that it was patient of refusal to in- 
dulge it, that his poetry, in nearly the happiest of his 
master's phrases, was not exactly "inevitable," despite 
the exquisiteness of its quality on occasion. 

It is fortunate for the biographer that this earliest 
part of Mr Arnold's life is so fertile in poetry, for 
otherwise, in the dearth of information, it would be 
a terribly barren subject. The thirty years of life 
yield us hardly twenty pages of letters, of which the 
first, with its already cited sketch of Laleham, is per- 
haps the most interesting. At the Trafalgar Square 
riots of March 1848 the writer is convinced that 
"the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest son- 
ship and immense properties has struck " ; sees " a 
wave of more than American vulgarity, moral, intel- 
lectual, and social, preparing to break over us " ; and 
already holds that strange delusion of his that " the 
French are the most civilised of European peoples." 
He develops this on the strength of " the intelligence 
of their idea-moved classes" in a letter to his sister; 
meets Emerson in April ; goes to a Chartist " con- 
vention," and has a pleasant legend for Miss Martineau 
that the late Lord Houghton "refused to be sworn in 
as a special constable, that he might be free to as- 
sume the post of President of the Republic at a 
moment's notice." He continues to despair of his 



46 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

country a.s hopelessly as the Tuxfoid waiter ; ^ finds 
Bournemouth "a very stupid place" — which is dis- 
tressing; it is a stupid place enough now, but it was 
not then : "a great moorland covered with furze and 
low pine coming down to the sea " could never be 
that — and meets Miss Bronte, "past thirty and plain, 
with expressive grey eyes though." The rest we must 



^ "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do." — Sydney 
Smith to Jeffrey. 



47 



CHAPTER II. 

LIFE FROM 1851-62 SECOND SERIES OF POEMS 

MEROPE ON TRANSLATING HOMER. 

We must now return a little and give some account of 
Mr Arnold's actual life, from a period somewhat before 
that reached at the end of the last chapter. The ac- 
count need not be long, for the life, as has been said, 
was not in the ordinary sense eventful ; but it is neces- 
sary, and can be in this chapter usefully interspersed 
with an account of his work, which, for nine of the 
eleven years we shall cover, was, though interesting, of 
much less interest than that of those immediately be- 
fore and those immediately succeeding. 

One understands at least part of the reason for the 
gradual drying up of his poetic vein from a sentence of 
his in a letter of 1858, when he and his wife at last took 
a house in Chester Square : " It will be something to 
unpack one's portmanteau for the first time since I was 
married, nearly seven years ago." "Something," in- 
deed j and one's only wonder is how he, and still more 
Mrs Arnold (especially as they now had three children), 



48 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

could have endured the other thing so long. There is 
no direct information in the Letters as to the reason of 
this nomadic existence, the only headquarters of which 
appear to have been the residence of Mrs Arnold's 
father, the judge, in Eaton Place, with flights to friends' 
houses and to lodgings at the places of inspection and 
others, especially Dover and Brighton. And guesswork 
is nowhere more unprofitable than in cases where private 
matters of income, taste, and other things are concerned. 
But it certainly would appear, though I have no positive 
information on the subject, that in the early days of 
State interference with education " My Lords " managed 
matters with an equally sublime disregard of the com- 
fort of their officials and the probable efficiency of the 
system.^ 

^ The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little bio- 
graphical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general 
report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln, Notting- 
ham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, 
Leicester, Rutland and Midlands, Gloucester, Monmouth, all South 
Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and 
West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity 
reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist 
schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially 
Wesleyan and the then powerful " British " schools. As the schools 
multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster 
only ; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic schools 
remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the some- 
what exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and 
political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the 
" Philistine ") with these associations of his. We must never forget 
that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not 
of Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel. 



1851-1862. 49 

Till I noticed the statement quoted opposite, I was 
quite unable to construct any reasonable theory from 
such a passage as that in a letter of December 1852^ and 
from others which show us Mr Arnold in Lincolnshire, 
in Shropshire, and in the eastern counties. Even with 
the elucidation it seems a shockingly bad system. One 
doubts whether it be worse for an inspector or for the 
school inspected by him, that he should have no oppor- 
tunity for food from breakfast to four o'clock, when he 
staves off death by inviting disease in the shape of the 
malefic bun ; for him or for certain luckless pupil- 
teachers that, after dinner, he should be " in for [them] 
till ten o'clock." With this kind of thing when on duty, 
and no home when off it, a man must begin to appreci- 
ate the Biblical passages about partridges, and the wings 
of a dove, and so forth, most heartily and vividly long 
before seven years are out, more particularly if he be a 
man so much given to domesticity as was Matthew 
Arnold. 

However, it was, no doubt, not so bad as it looks. 
They say the rack is not, though probably no one would 
care to try. There were holidays ; there was a large 
circle of hospitable family friends, and strangers were 
only too anxious to welcome (and perhaps to propitiate) 
Her Majesty's Inspector. The agreeable anomalies of 

^ "I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 
20th of January in London without moving, then for a week to 
Huntingdonshire schools, then for another to London, . . , and 
then Birmingham for a month." 

D 



50 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the British legal system (which, let Dickens and other 
grumblers say what they like, have made many good 
people happy and only a few miserable) allowed Mr 
Arnold for many years to act (sometimes while simul- 
taneously inspecting) as his father-in-law's Marshal on 
circuit, with varied company and scenery, little or noth- 
ing to do, a handsome fee for doing it, and no worse 
rose-leaf in the bed than heavy dinners and hot port 
wine, even this being alleviated by " the perpetual haunch 
of venison." 

For the rest, there are some pleasing miscellaneous 
touches in the letters for these years, and there is a 
certain liveliness of phrase in them which disappears 
in the later. It is pleasant to find Mr Arnold on 
his first visit to Cambridge (where, like a good Words- 
worthian, he wanted above all things to see the statue 
of Newton) saying what all of us say, " I feel that 
the Middle Ages, and all their poetry and impressive- 
ness, are in Oxford and not here." In one letter — 
written to his sister " K " (Mrs Forster) as his critical 
letters usually are — we find three noteworthy criticisms 
on contemporaries, all tinged with that slight want of 
cordial appreciation which characterises his criticism 
of this kind throughout (except, perhaps, in the case 
of Browning). The first is on Alexander Smith — it 
was the time of the undue ascension of the Life- 
Dra7?ia rocket before its equally undue fall. " It can 
do me no good [an odd phrase] to be irritated with 
that young man, who certainly has an extraordinary 



1S51-1862. 51 

faculty, although I think he is a phenomenon of a 
very dubious character." The second, harsher but 
more definite, is on Villetfe. " Why is Villette disagree- 
able? Because the writer's mind [it is worth remem- 
bering that he had met Charlotte Bronte at Miss Mar- 
tineau's] contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and 
rage, and therefore that is all she can in fact put into 
her book. No fine writing can hide this thoroughly, 
and it will be fatal to her in the long-run." The Fates 
were kinder : and Miss Bronte's mind did contain some- 
thing besides these ugly things. But it was her special 
weakness that her own thoughts and experiences were 
insufficiently mingled and tempered by a wider know- 
ledge of life and literature. The third is on My Novell 
which he says he has " read with great pleasure, though 
Bulwer's nature is by no means a perfect one either, 
which makes itself felt in his book ; but his gush, his 
better humour, his abundant materials, and his mel- 
lowed constructive skill — all these are great things." 
One would give many pages of the Letters for that naif 
admission that "gush" is "a great thing." 

A little later (May 1S53), all his spare time is being 
spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing 
he has yet done, to wit, Sohrab and Riistum. And 
he "never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly 
at ease as to criticism." He stays in barracks at the 
depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and 
we regret to find that "Death or Glory" manners do 
not please him. The instance is a cornet spinning his 



52 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

rings on the table after dinner. " College does civilise 
a boy," he ejaculates, which is true — always providing 
that it is a good college. Yet, with that almost uncon- 
scious naturalness which is particularly noticeable in 
him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford — thinks it (as 
we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the 
infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time of the 
first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, 
though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably dis- 
agreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle- 
class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere 
about the same time that " of all dull, stagnant, un- 
edifying entourages^ that of middle-class Dissent is the 
stupidest." It is sad to find that he thinks women 
utterly unfit for teachers and lecturers ; but Girton 
and Lady Margaret's may take comfort, it is " no 
natural incapacity, but the fault of their bringing-up." 
With regard to his second series of Poems {v. infra) 
he thinks Balder will "consolidate the peculiar sort 
of reputation he got by Sohrab and Rustimi ; " and a 
little later, in April 1856, we have his own opinion 
of himself as a poet, whose charm is " literalness and 
simplicity.'' Mr Ruskin is also treated — with less ap- 
preciation than one could wish. 

The second series just mentioned was issued in 1855, 
a second edition of the first having been called for the 
year before. It contained, like its predecessor, such of 
his earlier work as he chose to republish and had not 
yet republished, chiefly from the Empedocles volume. 



1851-1862. 53 

But Empedodes itself was only represented by some 
scraps, mainly grouped as TJie Ilarp-Player on Etna. 
Faded Leaves^ grouped with an addition, here appear : 
Stagirius is called Desire^ and the Stanzas in Alemory 
of the Author of Oberinann now become Ol?erma?m 
simply. Only two absolutely new poems, a longer 
and a shorter, appear : the first is balder Dead, the 
second Separatio7i, the added number of Faded Leaves. 
This is of no great value. Balder is interesting, though 
not extremely good. Its subject is connected with 
that of Gray's DesceJit of Odin, but handled much more 
fully, and in blank -verse narrative instead of ballad 
form. The story, Hke most of those in Norse myth- 
ology, has great capabihties ; but it may be questioned 
whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the 
poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The 
death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are 
touchingly done, and Hermod's ride to Hela's realm 
is stately. But as a whole the thing is rather dim and 
tame. 

Mr Arnold's election to the Professorship of Poetry at 
Oxford (May 1857) was a really notable event, not merely 
in his own career, but to some, and no small, extent in 
the history of English literature during the nineteenth 
century. The post is of no great value. I remember 
the late Sir Francis Doyle, who was Commissioner of 
Customs as well as Professor, saying to me once with a 
humorous melancholy, " Ah ! Eau de Cologne pays ??mch 
better than Poetry ! " But its duties are far from heavy, 



54 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

and can be adjusted pretty much as the holder pleases. 
And as a position it is unique. It is, though not of 
extreme antiquity, the oldest purely literary Professorship 
in the British Isles ; and it remained, till long after Mr 
Arnold's time, the only one of the kind in the two great 
English Universities. In consequence partly of the 
regulation that it can be held for ten years only — 
nominally five, with a practically invariable re-election 
for another five — there is at least the opportunity, 
which, since Mr Arnold's own time, has been gener- 
ally taken, of maintaining and refreshing the distinc- 
tion of the occupant of the chair. Before his time 
there had been a good many undistinguished pro- 
fessors, but Warton and Keble, in their different ways, 
must have adorned even a Chair of Poetry even in 
the University of Oxford. Above all, the entire (or 
almost entire) freedom of action left to the Professor 
should have, and in the case of Keble at least had 
already had, the most stimulating effect on minds cap- 
able of stimulation. For the Professor of Poetry at 
Oxford is neither, like some Professors, bound to the 
chariot - wheels of examinations and courses of set 
teaching, nor, like others, has he to feel that his 
best, his most original, efforts can have no interest, 
and hardly any meaning, for all but a small circle of 
experts. His field is illimitable; his expatiation in it 
is practically untrammelled. It is open to all ; full of 
flowers and fruits that all can enjoy ; and it only de- 
pends on his own choice and his own literary and 



1851-1862. 55 

intellectual powers whether his prelections shall take 
actual rank as literature with the very best of that 
other literature, with the whole of which, by custom, 
as an extension from poetry, he is at liberty to deal. 
In the first century of the chair the custom of delivering 
these Prelections in Latin had been a slight hamper — 
indeed to this day it prevents the admirable work of 
Keble from being known as it should be known. But 
this was now removed, and Mr Arnold, whose reputa- 
tion (it could hardly be called fame as yet) was already 
great with the knowing ones, had not merely Oxford 
but the English reading world as audience. 

And he had it at a peculiarly important time, to the 
importance of which he himself, in this very position, was 
not the least contributor. Although the greatest writers 
of the second period of the century — Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Carlyle, Thackeray — had, in all cases but the last, a 
long, and in the two first a very long and a wonderfully 
fruitful career still before them, yet the phase to which 
they belonged was as a dominant phase at its height, and 
as a crescent was beginning to give place to another. 
Within a few years — in most cases within a few months 
— of Mr Arnold's installation. The Defence of Guinevere 
and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam heralded fresh forms of 
poetry which have not been superseded yet ; The Origin 
of Species and Essays a7id Reviews announced changed 
attitudes of thought ; the death of Macaulay removed 
the last writer who, modern as he was in some ways, and 
popular, united popularity with a distinctly eighteenth- 



56 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

century tone and tradition ; the death of Leigh Hunt 
removed the last save Landor (always and in all things 
an outsider) of the great Romantic generation of the first 
third of the century ; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 
started a new kind of novel. 

The division which Mr Arnold, both by office and 
taste, was called to lead in this newly levied army, was 
not far from being the most important of all ; and it was 
certainly that of all which required the most thorough 
reformation of staff, morale^ and tactics. The English 
literary criticism of 1 830-1 860, speaking in round num- 
bers, is curiously and to this day rather unintelligibly 
bad. There is, no doubt, no set of matters in which it 
is less safe to generalise than in matters literary, and 
this is by no means the only instance in which the 
seemingly natural anticipation that a period of great 
criticism will follow a period of great creation is falsified. 
But it most certainly is falsified here. The criticism of 
the great Romantic period of 179 8- 1830 was done for it 
by itself, and in some cases by its greatest practitioners, 
not by its immediate successors. The philosophic as 
well as poetical intuition of Coleridge; the marvellous 
if capricious sympathy and the more marvellous 
phrase of Lamb ; the massive and masculine if not 
always quite trustworthy or well - governed intellect of 
Hazlitt, had left no likes behind. Two survivors of this 

^ There are persons who would spell this moral ; but I am not 
writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from 
Chesterfield downwards is my authority. 



1851-1862. 57 

great race, Leigh Hunt and De Quincey, were indeed 
critics, and no inconsiderable ones ; but the natural force 
of both had long been much abated, and both had been 
not so much critics as essayists ; the tendency of Hunt 
to flowery sentimentality or familiar chat, and that of 
De Quincey to incessant divergences of "rigmarole," 
being formidable enemies to real critical competence. 
The greatest prosemen — not novelists — of the genera- 
tion now closing, Carlyle and Macaulay, were indeed 
both considerable critics. But the shadow of death in 
the one case, the "shadow of Frederick" in the other, 
had cut short their critical careers : and presumptuous 
as the statement may seem, it may be questioned whether 
either had been a great critic — in criticism pure and 
simple — of literature. 

What is almost more important is that the average 
literary criticism of William IV. 's reign and of the 
first twenty years of her present Majesty's was exceed- 
ingly bad. At one side, of course, the work of men like 
Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by 
profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes 
this verdict. At the other were men (very few of them 
indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical quali- 
fications, but had allowed certain theories and predilec- 
tions to harden and ossify within them, and who in 
some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways 
of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the 
average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as 
a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of 



58 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its 
general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, 
long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not 
know with how much justice) the repute of being the 
person whom Thackeray's Thunder and Small Beer has 
gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its 
bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudi- 
ments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most 
interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate 
spared him, might have grown into a great as he already 
was a good critic) we may not trace something of the 
same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and 
" wobbling " between the expression of unconnected and 
unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the 
piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or 
demerits of scheme and form. 

Not for the first time help came to us Trojans Grata 
ab urbe. Of the general merits of French literary criti- 
cism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea 
than that which (in consequence of the very circum- 
stances with which we are now dealing) it has been 
for many years fashionable in England to hold. But 
between 1830 and i860 the French had a very strong 
critical school indeed — a school whose scholars and 
masters showed the dsemonic, or at least prophetic, 
inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still 
inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness 
and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic 
wit of Merimee, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, 



1851-1862. 59 

and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of 
Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest 
possible differences, not merely of personal taste and 
genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where 
they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of 
English critics, and favourably from all but the highest 
in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of 
scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic 
of them usually tried to compare the subject with its 
likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other 
literatures ; even the most Classical acknowledged, to 
some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to 
understand, to grasp the case of the victim before 
ordering him off to execution. 

In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two 
acknowledgments of the duty of the critic embraced 
each other in the happiest union. The want of en- 
thusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged 
against him, comes in reality to no more than this 
— that he is too busy in analysing, putting together 
again, comparing, setting things in different lights and 
in different companies, to have much time for dithy- 
rambs. And the preference of second- to first-class sub- 
jects, which has been also urged, is little more than the 
result of the fact that these processes are more telling, 
more interesting, and more needed in the case of the 
former than in the case of the latter. Homer, yEschylus, 
Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their 
own way with all fit readers sooner or later : it is not so 



60 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

with Meleager or Macrobius or Marniontel, with William 
Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock. 

But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr 
Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one 
upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Pro- 
fessor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but 
more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long 
entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means 
of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on 
Sainte-Beuve's own lines, partly on others which he had 
already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and 
in some later critical writings, and which he was for the 
rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, some- 
times rather disastrously to extend. 

Still it has always been held that this chair is not 
merely a chair of criticism ; and Mr Arnold lodged a 
poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Mcrope. This 
was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto 
— a document to show what the only Professor of 
Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory 
and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as 
was to be expected from the author's official position 
and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, 
much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. 
He even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers 
were not pleased. The AthencBu??i review is " a choice 
specimen of style," and the Spectator "of argumentation"; 
the Saturday Review is only " deadly prosy," but none 
were exactly favourable till G. H. Lewes in The Leader 



icS5i-i862. 6i 

was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little 
kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to 
whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given "a flaming 
testimonial for Rugby '"') read it " with astonishment at 
its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed, 
is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of 
the Letters good - naturedly but perhaps rather super- 
fluously reintroduces to the British public as "author 
of The Saints' Tragedy and other poems") was "very 
handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "dis- 
continue the line," was not uncomplimentary in other 
ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters 
together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he 
"saw the book was not going to take as he wished," 
and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugu- 
rate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply 
the present race of hunumsr Let us see what "she" 
is actually like. 

It is rather curious that the story of }>Ierope should 
have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, 
Mafl'ei's attempt in Italian, Voltaire's in French, and 
this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to have been 
to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the 
Classical drama : and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. 
For the fact is that the donne'e is very much more of the 
Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers 
much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the 
Classical practitioner. With minor variations, the story 
as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed 



62 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved 
her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Poly- 
phontes, and sent him out of the country. When he 
has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to 
take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let 
bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile 
the jarring parties in the State. /Epytus, the son, to 
facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger 
charged to bring the news of his own death ; and 
Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to 
be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber 
where he is resting after his journey, and is about to 
murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the 
inevitable a7iagnorisis. The party of Cresphontes is 
then secretly roused. y^Epytus, at the sacrifice which 
the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival's 
death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes 
himself, and all ends well. 

There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here ; 
but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one 
for classical tragedy. At any rate the Aristotelian con- 
ditions — the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of 
sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism — are very ill satis- 
fied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic blood- 
shed, as there would have been had Merope actually 
killed her son. The arresting and triumphant " grip " 
of the tragic misfortunes of Q2dipus and Orestes, the 
combination of the course of fate and the d/xaprta of 
the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope 



1851-1862. 63 

by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insig- 
nificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has 
rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of 
limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt ; but who cares 
whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the 
heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to 
help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspir- 
ing to the modern reader. When he was at work upon 
the piece he had " thought and hoped " that it would 
have what Buddha called " the character of Fixity, that 
true sign of the law." A not unfriendly critic might 
have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign 
of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as 
a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should 
"transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any 
one who reads the book that the author was in a mood 
of deliberate provocation and exaggeration — not a 
favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles 
is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr 
Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. 
The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and 
their snip-snap stichomythia, read equally ill in English. 
Mr Swnnburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold 
failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect 
of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and 
musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as 
might have been expected from his previous experi- 
ments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and 
antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables ; 



64 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very 

much, vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely 

preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear 

of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone 

the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like 

the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as 

this :— 

"Three brothers roved the field, 
And to two did Destiny 
Give the thrones that they conquer'd, 
But the third, what delays him 
From his unattained crown ? " 

But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste 
modern love for passages and patches. Tell me how 
I managed this worthy action ? " To which the only 
answer can be, " Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. 
Save at one moment you have not raised the interest 
anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most 
of it there." 

The fact is, that very few even of thorough -going 
Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as " fighting a 
prize," could have had, much to say for Merope. The 
author pleads that he only meant "to give people a 
specimen of the world created by the Greek imagina- 
tion." In the first place, one really cannot help (with 
the opening speech of the rrometheiLS, and the close of 
the Eumenides^ and the whole of the Agamemnon in one's 
mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks. 
And in the second place, what a curious way of setting 
about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual 



1851-1862. 65 

"world" so "created," not mQXQ J)astiches and plaster 
models of them, are still to be had, and of the very 
best ! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all 
men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was 
clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to 
depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts 
(which is generally a much wiser heart than that accord- 
ing to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he 
knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted any- 
thing of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of 
plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see 
in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra — " Frag- 
ment of an Antigoiie^^ " Fragment of a Dejaneira" 
grouped at her feet. In the definitive edition in- 
deed, she is not with these but with E?npedocks on 
Et7ia, a rather unlucky contrast. For Empedodes, if 
very much less deliberately Greek than Merope^ is very 
much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the 
comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader 
that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely 
the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr Arnold had 
forgotten his master's words about the oikeia hedone. 
The pleasure of Greek art is one thing — the pleasure 
of English poetry another. 

His inaugural lecture, " On the Modern Element 
in Literature," was printed many years afterwards in 
MacmillarCs Magazine for February 1869; and this 
long hesitation seems to have been followed by an 
even longer repentance, for the piece was never in- 

E 



66* MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

eluded in any one of his volumes of essays. But 
the ten years of his professorship are, according to 
the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented 
by the two famous little books — On Tra?isiatiftg 
Homer, which, with its supplementary "Last Words," 
appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic 
Literatu7'e, which appeared at the termination of his 
tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he 
ever did anything of more influence than these books, 
this being due partly to the fashion of their publica- 
tion — which, in the latter case at least, applied the 
triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English 
literary centres, of magazine article, and of book — 
and partly to the fact that they were about subjects 
in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, 
interest was taken by almost every one. Every edu- 
cated person knew and cared something (or at least 
would not have liked to be supposed not to care and 
know something) about Homer ; very few educated 
persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But 
in these later lectures he put in a more popular and 
provocative form than that of his F7'e7ich Eton (see 
next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, 
and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for 
which he was thenceforward best known ; and which, 
if it brought down some hard knocks from his adver- 
saries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture 
for himself, could at least not be charged by any 
reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality. 



1851-1862. 67 

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of 
personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, in- 
teresting ; and both had, perhaps even more than the 
Assays i?i Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect 
upon English men of letters which can hardly be 
overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox 
that they owe not a little of their value to their faults ; 
but they owe a great deal more to their merits. 

The faults are apparent enough even in the first 
series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet 
it is really difficult to say when a more important 
book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's 
Essay of Dramatic Foesy, Johnson's Lives at their 
frequent best, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria^ are 
greater things ; but hardly the best of them was in 
its day more " important for us.^^ To read even the 
best of that immediately preceding criticism of which 
something has been said above — nay, even to recur 
to Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb — and then to 
take up On Translati?ig Homer, is to pass to a critic 
with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, 
with a style of his own, and with an almost entirely 
novel conception of the whole art of criticism. For 
the first time (even Coleridge v/ith much wider read- 
ing had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) 
we find the two great ancient and the three or four 
great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, 
used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out 
each other's defects and throw up each other's merits. 



68 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient htera- 
ture treated more or less like modern — neither from 
the merely philological point of view, nor with refer- 
ence to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. 
The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general 
principles — in fact, he is rather too fond of them — 
but his object is anything rather than mere arid 
deduction and codification. He has the aesthetic 
sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without 
the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different 
kind of wilfulness from that of either. Finally, in 
one of the numerous ways in which he shows that 
his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the 
queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all 
manner of digressions and side - flings. And last of 
all, he has that new style of which we spoke — a style 
by no means devoid of affectation and even trick, 
threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of man- 
nerism, but attractive in its very provocations, almost 
wholly original, and calculated, at least while it retains 
its freshness, to drive what is said home into the 
reader's mind and to stick it there. 

The faults, we said, both critical and non - critical, 
are certainly not lacking ; and if they were not partly 
excused by the author's avowedly militant position, 
might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may 
have been the want of taste, and even the want of 
sense, in the translation of F. VV. Newman, it is almost 
sufificient to say that they were neither greater nor 



1851-1862. 69 

less than might have been expected from a person 
who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the 
most eccentric even of English scholars. It is diffi- 
cult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much 
of them and refers too frequently to them. Such 
" iteration " is literally " damnable " : it must be con- 
demned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even 
not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with 
which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his 
countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was in- 
deed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; 
but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe. 
It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be 
young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his 
book has " no reason for existing " ; but chairs of 
literature are not maintained by universities that their 
occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise 
the functions of young anonymous reviewers. It may 
indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, 
except in the most guarded way, touch living persons 
at all. 

Critically too, as well as from the point of view of 
manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open 
to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the as- 
sumptions- are enormous, and, in some cases at least, 
demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest 
points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman 
but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned 
with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjec- 



70 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

tives, especially the stock ones — koruthaiolos^ vierops^ 
and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of 
repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike 
a Greek scholar as out of the way ; the English 
equivalents do so strike an EngHsh reader. Now as 
to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing : they 
have left us no positive information on the sub- 
ject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) 
koruthaiolos and dolichosJziofi do not strike us, who 
have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we 
can remember, as out of the way, is that an argu- 
ment? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten 
years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal 
earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary 
Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai 
and ara ; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn 
English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would 
it be so ? I think not ; nor would it be so if people 
began Greek at a later and more critical stage of 
their education. 

It is also true that the book is full of that exceed- 
ingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather 
fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable 
aesthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr 
Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the 
mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton 
can never be affected, we murmur, "Z>^ gustibiis /" 
and add mentally, "Though Milton is the greatest 
of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least. 



1851-1862. 71 

never anything else ! " When he tells us again that 
at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living 
intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of 
France and Germany," we remember that at the time 
France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor 
Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre 
of a dozen Englishmen — Tennyson, Browning, Car- 
lyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from 
Landor to Mr Ruskin ; that Germany, further, had 
scarcely one, though France had more than one or 
two, great writers of the second class : and we say, 
" Either your ' living intellectual instrument ' is a juggle 
of words, or you really are neglecting fact." Many — 
very many — similar retorts are possible ; and the most 
hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at 
Mr Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile 
mule the English hexameter, and when we review the 
specimens of the animal that he turns out from his 
own stables for our inspection. 

But it matters not. For all this, and very much 
more than all this, which may be passed over as 
unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, 
for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal 
influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing 
of the same quality and influence has been seen for 
more than a technical generation since. It would of 
course be uncritical in the last degree to take the 
change in English criticism which followed as wholly 
and directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even 



72 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the voice crying in the wilderness : only one ^f many 
voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. 
But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, 
most original, most potent ; and a great deal of what 
followed was directly due to him. 

The non-literary events of his life during this period 
were sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We 
have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which 
took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength 
of the additional income from Oxford. In the late 
summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, 
and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, 
to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, 
Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on 
elementary education. " Foreign life," he says, with 
that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of 
his letters, " is still to me perfectly delightful and 
liberating in the last degree." And he was duly 
*' presented " at home, in order that he might be 
presentable abroad. But the first days of the actual 
sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his 
mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of 
his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse. 

He had, however, plenty to distract him. France 
was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impos- 
sible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration 
of French military and other greatness without rather 
mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, 
which struck him as it must strike every one. Here 



1851-1862. 73 

he is pathetic over a promising but not performing 
dinner at Auray — " soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, 
fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus ; " but 
"everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread 
and cheese. He must have been unlucky : the little 
Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, 
used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to 
an Englishman ; but their provender was usually far 
from contemptible. There is more sense of Breton 
scenery in another letter a little later. Both here 
and, presently^ in Gascony he notes truly enough 
"the incredible degree to which the Revolution has 
cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country 
people " ; but if he reflected on the bad national effect 
of this breach with the past, he does not say so. 
By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not Hke it 
— weather, language, &c., all English in the worst 
sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin ele- 
ment which just saves us. And though he was a 
very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve 
his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets 
back to Paris — in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly 
as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is 
accordingly very funny to read. The two things that 
make Holland most interesting, history and art, were 
exactly those that appealed to }.Ir x\rnold least. Then 
after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, 
and Time — Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger 
and Consoler — makes him commit himself dreadfully. 



74 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

He "thinks there cannot be a moment's doubt" that 
the French will beat the Prussians even far more 
completely and rapidly than they are beating the 
Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, "entirely shared" 
his conviction that " the French will always beat any 
number of Germans who come into the field against 
them, and never be beaten by any one but the 
English." Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled 
half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest 
of it ! Switzerland comes next ; and he is beginning 
to want very much to be back in England, partly 
" for the children, but partly also from affection for 
that fooHsh old country" — which paternal and patri- 
otic desire was granted about the end of the month, 
though only for a short time, during which he wrote 
a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then "M. le 
Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur General de 
toutes les Ecoles de la Grande Bretagne," returned 
to France for a time, saw Merimee and George Sand 
and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and 
was back again for good in the foolish old country at 
the end of the month. 

In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volun- 
teer, commenting not too happily on " the hideous Eng- 
lish toadyism which invests lords and great people with 
commands," a remark which seems to clench the infer- 
ence that he had not appreciated the effect of the 
Revolution upon France. For nearly three parts of 
i860 we have not a single letter, except one in January 



1851-1862. 75 

pleasantly referring to his youngest child "in black 
velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that 
it was hard to take one's eyes off him." ^ This letter, by 
the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of 
the remark quoted just now. He says of the x\mericans, 
" It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up 
properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy 
to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of 
their national existence." This is a confession. The 
gap, however, is partly atoned for by a very pleasant 
batch in September from Viel Salm in the Ardennes, 
where the whole family spent a short time, and where 
the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain 
had splendid fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being 
only accustomed to nets. 

Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures 
on translating Homer, and Tennyson's "deficiency in 
intellectual power," and Mr Arnold's own interest in the 
Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk. It seems 
that he has " a strong sense of the irrationality of that 
period " and of " the utter folly of those who take it 
seriously and play at restoring it." Still it has " poetically 
the greatest charm and refreshment for me." One may 
perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much 
real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational 

^ The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage 
of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and ' ' Budge," at 
vol. i. p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's reply, 
"Oh this is, false, Budge, this is z\\ false !^^ to his infant brother's 
protestations of affection. 



76 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

and which you don't take seriously '• the practice seems 
to be not unHke that mediaeval one of keeping fools for 
your delectation. Nor can the observations on Tenny- 
son be said to be quite just or quite pleasant. But every 
age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate 
predecessor — a saying dangerous and double-edged, but 
true for all that. Then he " entangles himself in the 
study of accents " — it would be difficult to find any ad- 
venturer who has fiot entangled himself in that study — 
and groans over " a frightful parcel of grammar papers," 
which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the 
very unwholesome principle (though this was not the 
same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when 
he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o'clock. 
Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks 
in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from 
F. W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), 
and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, 
diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a 
dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over 
the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. 
Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, 
is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one 
time thought it distantly possible, though not likely, that 
he would be ejected for the part he took. x\nd his first 
five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with the 
delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition 
of which he consoles himself (having heard both from 
the Vice-Chancellor and others that there was to be " a 



1851-1862. 77 

great row ") by reflecting that " it doesn't much matter 
what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do not 
know whether the prediction was justified ; but if so, the 
same fate had, according to tradition, befallen his New- 
digate some twenty years earlier. In neither case can 
the "row" have had any personal reference. Though 
his lectures were never largely attended by undergradu- 
ates, he was always popular in Oxford. 



78 



CHAPTER III. 

A FRENCH ETON ESSAYS IN CRITICISM CELTIC 

LITERATURE NEIV POEMS LIFE FROM 1862 TO 

1867. 

The period of Mr Arnold's second tenure of the Poetry 
Chair, from 1862 to 1867, was much more fertile in re- 
markable books than that of his first. It was during 
this time that he established himself at once as the leader 
of English critics by his JE^ssays in Criticism (some of 
which had first taken form as Oxford Lectures) and that 
he made his last appearance with a considerable collec- 
tion of New Poems. It was during this, or immediately 
after its expiration, that he issued his second collected 
book of lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature ; and 
it was then that he put in more popular, though still in 
not extremely popular, forms the results of his investi- 
gations into Continental education. It was during this 
time also that his thoughts took the somewhat unfor- 
tunate twist towards the mission of reforming his coun- 
try, not merely in matters literary, where he was excel- 
lently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much more 



1 862- 1 86/. 79 

dubiously warranted function of political, " sociological," 
and above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller. 
With all these things we must now deal. 

No one of Mr Arnold's books is more important, or 
more useful in studying the evolution of his thought and 
style, than A French Eton (1864). Although he was 
advancing in middle-life when it was written, and had 
evidently, as the phrase goes, " made up his bundle of 
prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, 
very much prose ; his mannerisms had not hardened. 
And above all, he was but just catching the public ear, 
and so was not tempted to assume the part of Chester- 
field-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of 
some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to 
his own disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted 
with the facts of his subject, which was not always the 
case later; and though his assumptions — the insensi- 
bility of aristocracies to ideas, the superiority of the 
French to the English in this respect, the failure of the 
Anglican Church, and so forth — are already as question- 
able as they are confident, he puts them with a certain 
modesty, a certain eineLKeia, which was perhaps not 
always so obvious when he came to preach that 
quality itself later. About the gist of the book it is not 
necessary to say very much. He practically admits the 
obvious and unanswerable objection that his French Eton, 
whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at 
Soreze, is very French, but not at all Eton. He does 
not really attempt to meet the more dangerous though 



8o MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

less epigrammatic demurrer, " Do you want schools to 
turn out products of this sort ? " It was only indirectly 
his fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of 
his arguments, that a process of making ducks and drakes 
of English grammar-school endowments began, and was 
(chiefly in the " seventies ") carried on, with results, the 
mischievousness of which apparently has been known 
and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly 
kept to themselves. 

All this is already ancient history, and history not 
ancient enough to be venerable. But the book as a 
book, and also as a document in the case, has, and 
always will have, interest. " The cries and catch- 
words " which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often 
do denounce their own most besetting temptations, 
have not yet quite mastered him ; but they have made 
a lodgment. The revolt — in itself quite justifiable, and 
even admirable — from the complacent acceptance of 
English middle-class thought, English post-Reform-Bill 
politics, English mid-century taste and ethics and philo- 
sophy, — from everything, in short, of which Macaulay 
was the equally accepted and representative eulogist 
and exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and 
almost hostile sources that we must expect help. The 
State is to resume, or to initiate, its guidance of a very 
large part, if not of the whole, of the matters which 
popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike, then 
assigned to individual action or private combination. 
We have not yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace 



T 862- 1 86/. 8 1 

labelled with their tickets and furnished with their 
descriptions ; but the three classes are already sharply 
separated in Mr Arnold's mind, and we can see that 
only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts cir- 
cumcision and culture fully, is there to be any salvation. 
The anti-clerical and anti-theological animus is already 
strong ; the attitude daiitis jura Catonis is arranged ; the 
'^ura themselves, if not actually graven and tabulated, 
can be seen coming with very little difficulty. Above 
all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside ; the 
Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell ; we have turned 
to prose and (as we can best manage it) sense. 

But A French Eton is perhaps most interesting for its 
style. In this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct 
one, between the Preface of 1853 and the later and 
better known works. More of a concio ad vulgus than 
the former, it shows a pretty obvious endeavour to 
soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the 
academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not 
yet display those "mincing graces" which were some- 
times attributed (according to a very friendly and most 
competent critic, " harshly, but justly ") to the later. 
The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are 
pretty clearly imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary — 
"habitude," "repartition," for "habit," "distribution" 
— makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the con- 
junction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of 
adjectives and substantives, with never an " and " to 
string them together, is here. But no one of these 

F 



82 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

tricks, nor any other, is present in excess : there is 
nothing that can justly be called falsetto ; and in es- 
pecial, though some names of merely ephemeral in- 
terest are in evidence — Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., 
Mr Arnold's well - known substitutes for Cleon and 
Cinesias— there is nothing like the torrent of personal 
allusion in Friendship's Garland. " Bottles " and his 
company are not yet with us ; the dose of persiflage 
is rigorously kept down ; the author has not reached the 
stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the principle so 
wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that 

** What I tell you three times is true," 

and that the truth could be made truest by making the 
three thirty. 

The result is that he never wrote better. A little 
of the dignity of his earlier manner — when he simply 
followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which 
Newman was the greatest master and the last — is 
gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some 
— indeed a good deal — of the piquancy of the later 
is not yet apparent ; but its absence implies, and is 
more than compensated by, the concomitant absence 
of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an aca- 
demic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of 
motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on 
the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in 
English a better example of the blending and concilia- 
tion of the two modes of argumentative writing referred 



1862-1867. 83 

to in Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first 
object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft 
and insinuating ; if you want to confute, the rougher 
and more unsparing the better. And the description 
and characterisation are quite excellent. 

Between A French Eto7i and the second collection 
of Oxford Lectures came, in 1865, the famous Essays 
in Ci'iticisin^ the first full and varied, and perhaps 
always the best, expression and illustration of the 
author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto and ex- 
emplar of the new critical method, and so one of the 
epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century 
in English. It consisted, in the first edition, of a 
Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) 
and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the 
addition of A Persian Passion- Play). The two first 
of these were general, on The Function of Criiicism 
at the Present Ti?ne and The Literary I?ifiuence of 
Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively 
with the two Guerins, Heine, Pagan and MedicEval 
Religious Se?itiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus 
Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too 
strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to 
the indifference of the English people to criticism that 
no second edition of this book was called for till 
four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth 
for nearly twenty. 

Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the 
very slightest degree critical, it is one of the most 



84 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

fascinating (if sometimes also one of the most pro- 
voking) of books ; and the fascination and provoca- 
tion should surely have been felt even by others. As 
always with the author, there is nothing easier than 
to pick holes in it : in fact, on his own principles, 
one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently 
enjoyed himself very much in the Pj-eface : Imt it 
may be doubted \vhether the severe Goddess of Taste 
can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment. He 
is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt 
rather unwise Mr Wright (z>. supra) : he tells the 
Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull, and " Pres- 
byter Anglicanus " that he is born of Hyrcanian 
tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that 
he is a late and embarrassed convert to the PhiHs- 
tines. He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a 
Philistine of some substance and memory, but hap- 
less forgotten shadows like " Mr Clay," " Mr Dif- 
fanger," "Inspector Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to 
the contempt of the world. And then, when we are 
beginning to find all this laughter rather "thorn- 
crackHng" and a httle forced, the thing ends with 
the famous and magnificent epiphonema (as they would 
have said in the old days) to Oxford, which must for ever 
conciliate all sons of hers and all gracious outsiders 
to its author, just as it turns generation after genera- 
tion of her enemies sick with an agonised grin. 

So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, 
at the whim which made Mr Arnold waste two whole 



1862-1867. 85 

essays on an amiable and interesting person like 
Eugenie de Guerin and a mere nobody like her 
brother. They are very pretty essays in themselves ; 
but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), "all depends 
on the subject," and the subjects here are so exceed- 
ingly unimportant ! Besides, as he himself almost 
openly confessed, and as everybody admits now, he 
really did not understand French poetry at all. When 
we come to " Keats and Guerin," there is nothing for 
it but to take refuge in Byron's 

'^ Such names coupled ! " 

and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages 
of Matthew Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on 
a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by 
Sainte-Beuve ! 

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability 
to any such criticism as this. To some criticism — even 
to a good deal — it is beyond doubt exposed. The first 
and most famous paper — the general manifesto, as the 
earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its 
author's literary creed — on The Functio7i of Criticisi?i at 
the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same 
objections as those that have been made to the introduc- 
tion. Here is the celebrated passage about "Wraggis 
in custody," the text of which, though no doubt pain- 
ful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really 
a rather slender basis on which to draw up an in- 
dictment against a nation. Here is the astounding — 



S6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the, if serious, almost preternatural — statement that 
" not very much of current English literature comes 
into this best that is known and thought in the world. 
Not very much I fear : certainly less than of the current 
literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, 
when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine 
for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and 
Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose- 
writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and 
were not going to have any! It was 1865, when all 
the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty 
years' standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded ! 
1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, 
and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and 
prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost 
the score ! Here, too, is the marvellous companion- 
statement that in the England of the first quarter of 
the century was "no national glow of life." It was 
the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation 
fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into 
submission during a twenty years' struggle. 

But these things are only Mr Arnold's way. I have 
never been able to satisfy myself whether they were 
deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic 
paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that 
the Revue des Detix Mo?ides, an organ of " dukes, 
dunces, and devotes^'' as it used to be called even in 
those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing 
mother of Academies certainly, and a most respect- 



1 862- 1 86/. ^7 

able periodical in all ways — that this good Revue 
actually " had for its main function to understand 
and utter the best that is known and thought in the 
world," absolutely existed as an organ for " the free 
play of mind " ? I should be disposed to think that 
the truer explanation of such things is that they were 
neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms ; but 
the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe 
what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent 
desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily 
they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the 
letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy 
helps the rest to do a great deal of good. 

For there can be no doubt that in the main con- 
tention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold 
was absolutely right. It was true that England, save 
for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a 
few of her great men of letters — Ben Jonson, Dryden, 
Addison, Johnson — had been wonderfully deficient in 
criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century ; and 
that though in the early nineteenth she had produced 
one great philosophical critic, another even greater on 
the purely literary side, and a third of unique apprecia- 
tive sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had 
not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown 
certain critical limitations. It was true that though the 
Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us 
in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, 
method, sfyk of criticism. And it was truest of all 



88 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

(though Mr Arnold, who did not Hke the historic 
estimate, would have admitted this with a certain 
grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thor- 
ough "stock-taking" of our own literature in the 
light and with the help of others. 

Let t\\Q pahna — let the maxima palma — of criticism 
be given to him in that he first fought for the creed of 
this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with what- 
ever admixture of will-worship of his own, with what- 
ever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of 
the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may 
have been exaggerated ; one of the most necessary, 
though not of the most grateful, businesses of the 
literary historian is to point out that with rare excep- 
tions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great 
men of letters rather show in a general, early, and 
original fashion a common tendency than definitely 
lead an otherwise sluggish multitude to the promised 
land. But no investigation has deprived, or is at all 
likely to deprive, the Essays in Criticism of their place 
as an epoch-making book, as the manual of a new and 
often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, 
critical movement in England. 

Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill 
followed up in the second, the almost equally famous 
(perhaps the more famous) Influence of Academies. Of 
course here also, here as always, you may make reserva- 
tions. It is a very strong argument, an argument 
stronger than any of Mr Arnold's, that the institutions 



1 862- 1 86/. 89 

of a nation, if they are to last, if they are to do any 
good, must be in accordance with the spirit of the 
nation ; that if the French Academy has been bene- 
ficial, it is because the French spirit is academic ; and 
that if (as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according 
to our different principles) the English spirit is un- 
academic, an Academy would probably be impotent 
and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow 
for this ; and when we have allowed for it, once more 
Mr Arnold's warnings are warnings on the right side, 
true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor 
difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known 
of France in England then than now, there were those 
who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at 
the assertion that " openness of mind and flexibility of 
intelligence" were the characteristics of the French 
people. But once more also, no matter ! The cen- 
tral drift is right, and the central drift carries many 
excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash 
away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the 
average qualities of French prose ; whether he is right 
about the " provinciality " of Jeremy Taylor as compared 
to Bossuet or not, he is right about "critical freaks," 
though, by the way — but it is perhaps unnecessary to 
finish that sentence. He is right about the style of 
Mr Palgrave and right about the style of Mr Kinglake ; 
and I do not know that I feel more especially bound 
to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord 
Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these 



90 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

things as he was right, the central drift would still be 
inestimable — the drift of censure and contrast applied 
to English eccentricity, the argument that this eccen- 
tricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to be 
very bad. 

Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the 
author shows at his best. Even in the Guerin pieces, 
annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth- 
rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of 
the exposition and to the charming eulogy of " distinc- 
tion" at the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a 
little more about that French Romantic School which 
he despised, he would have hardly assigned this dis- 
tinction to Maurice ; and that Eugenie, though un- 
doubtedly a *' fair soul," was in this not distinguished 
from hundreds and thousands of other women, need 
not matter very much after all. And with the rest 
there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. 
One may doubt whether Heine's charm is not mainly 
due to the very lawlessness, the very contempt of " sub- 
ject," the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr 
Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the ex- 
cellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English 
tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German 
poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the 
poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the re- 
presentative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth 
century proper ? Very seldom (his 'applause of Gray, 
the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) 



1 862- 1 86/. 91 

does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm — not 
merely etigouement on the one side or serene approval 
on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire 
Heine for his " modern spirit " (why, O Macaree^ as 
his friend Maurice de Guerin might have said, should 
a modern spirit be better than an ancient one, or what 
is either before the Eternal?) instead of for what has 
been, conceitedly it niay be, called the " tear-dew and 
star-fire and rainbow-gold " of his phrase and verse. 
He felt this magic at any rate. No matter that he 
applies the wrong comparison instead of the right one, 
and depreciates French in order to exalt German, in- 
stead of thanking Apollo for these two good different 
things. The root of the matter is the right root, a 
discriminating enthusiasm : and the flower of the matter 
is one of the most charming critical essays in EngHsh. 
It is good, no doubt, to have made up one's mind about 
Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost 
envies those who were led to that enchanted garden 
by so delightful an interpreter. 

Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the 
sadness which must always blend with any treatment of 
Heine, is the next essay, the pet, I believe, of some 
very excellent judges, on " Pagan and Mediaeval Re- 
ligious Sentiment," with its notable translation of Theo- 
critus and its contrast with St Francis. One feels, 
indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped 
with knowledge on the one side as on the other ; 
indeed, he never was well read in mediaeval literature. 



92 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence ; in 
the sternest times of mihtary etiquette he could not 
have been put to death on the charge of holding out 
an untenable post ; and he puts the different sides with 
incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses 
Pagan morals rather doubtfully, but so skilfully ; he 
rumples and blackens mediseval life more than rather 
unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch ! 

Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in 
any hostile sense inferior, is the "Joubert." It has 
been the fashion with some to join this essay to the 
Guerin pieces as an instance of some incorrigible twist 
in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability to 
admire the right things, even when he did admire. I 
cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his 
own shortcomings as a /^?zi-/^ -writer. He is rococo 
beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside La Rochefou- 
cauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even 
if you take him by himself, and without comparison, 
something thin and amateurish and conventional about 
him. But this is by no means always or very often 
the case ; and his merits, very great in themselves, 
were even greater for Mr Arnold's general purpose. 

That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong 
when it selected Joubert as an eminent example of 
those gifts of the French mind which most commended 
themselves to itself — an exquisite justesse, an alertness 
of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, 
a consummate propriety in the true and best, not the 



1 862- 1 867. 93 

limited sense of the word. Nor is it difficult to observe 
in the shy philosopher a temperament which must have 
commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as strongly as 
his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected 
with that — the temperament of equity, of epieikeia, of 
freedom from swagger and brag and self-assertion. 
And here, once more, the things receive precisely their 
right treatment, the treatment proportioned and ad- 
justed at once to their own value and nature and to 
the use which their critic is intending to make of them. 
For it is one of the greatest literary excellences of the 
Essays in Criticis7n that, with rare exceptions, they bear 
a real relation to each other and to the whole — that 
they are not a bundle but an organism ; a university, 
not a mob. 

The subjects of the two last essays, Spinoza and 
Marcus Atirelius^ may at first sight, and not at first sight 
only, seem oddly chosen. For although the conception 
of literature illustrated in the earlier part of the book is 
certainly wide, and admits — nay, insists upon, as it 
always did with Mr Arnold — considerations of subject 
in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet 
it is throughout one of literature as such. Novv', we 
cannot say that the interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus 
Aurelius, great as it is in both cases, is wholly, or in 
the main, or even in any considerable part, a literary 
interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious 
interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost 
purely. The one may indeed illustrate that attempt to 



94 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

see things in a perfectly white light which Mr Arnold 
thought so important in literature ; the other, that atten- 
tion to conduct which he thought more important still. 
But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in 
relation to literature. They are less literary even than 
St Francis ; far less than the author of the Imitatio?t. 

It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including 
them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more pro- 
bably with some consciousness, was feeling his way 
towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, 
that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which 
he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that 
his experiments are on this particular occasion in any 
way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very 
strongest sympathy — with Spinoza (as already with 
Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit 
and genius, rebellious to or transcending the usual 
limitations of Hebraism ; with Marcus Aurelius as an 
example of that non-Christian morality and religiosity 
which also had so strong an attraction for him. There 
is no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost 
dismaying jocularity which was later to invade his dis- 
cussion of such things: we are still far from Bottles; the 
three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by not even threaten- 
ing to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in 
no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of 
an appendix or belated episode, to the charm of the 
book. They have an unction which never, as it so often 
does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master and 



1 862- 1 86/. 95 

model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity ; they are 
nobly serious, but without being in the least dull ; they 
contain some exceedingly just and at the same time per- 
fectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, 
and though they are not without instances of the author's 
by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no 
means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative 
nature. And I do not think it fanciful to suppose that 
the note of grave if unclassified piety, of reconciliation 
and resignation, with which they close the book, was 
intended — that it was a deliberate " evening voluntary" 
to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable 
function — such a function as criticism in English had 
not celebrated before, such as, I think, it may without 
unfairness be said has not been repeated since. Essays 
in C?'itids7ii, let us repeat, is a book which is classed 
and placed, and it will remain in that class and place : 
the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn 
unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither. 

Between this remarkable book and the later ones of 
the same /usfr7t7H, we may conveniently take up the 
thread of biography proper where we last dropped it. 
The letters are fuller for this period than perhaps for 
any other ; but this very fulness makes it all the more 
difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very 
first importance, but vying with each other in the minor 
biographical interests. A second fishing expedition to 
Viel Salm was attempted in August 1862 ; but it did not 
escape the curse which seems to dog attempts at repeti- 



g6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

tion of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly 
low ; the fish would not take ; and the traveller came 
back in very little more than " a day and a night and 
a morrow." By December danger-signals are up in a 
letter to his mother, to the effect that " it is intolerable 
absurdity to profess [who does?] to see Christianity 
through the spectacles of a number of second- or third- 
rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's tmie " — that 
time so fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the 
third. But it is followed a little later by the less dis- 
putable observation, " It is difficult to make out ex- 
actly at what [F. D.] Maurice is driving ; perhaps he 
is always a little dim in his own mind " on that point. 

The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, 
where like other people he found " the crowd very good- 
humoured," are noted ; and the beginning of Thy r sis 
where and while the fritillaries blow. But from the 
literary point of view few letters are more interesting 
than a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant 
Duff, dated May 14, 1863, in which Mr Arnold declines 
an edition of Heine, the loan of which was offered for 
his lecture — later the well-known essay. His object, 
he sayS;, "is not so much to give a literary history of 
Heine's work as to mark his place in modern European 
letters, and the special tendency and significance of what 
he did." He will, therefore, not even read these things 
of Heine's that he has not read, but will take the Roman- 
cero alone for his text, with a few quotations from else- 
where. With a mere passing indication of the fact that 



1 862- 1 86/. 97 

Matthew Arnold here, hke every good critic of this 
century, avowedly pursues that plan of " placing " writers 
which some of his own admirers so foolishly decry, I 
may observe that this is a locus classicus for his own 
special kind of criticism. It is possible — I do not know 
whether he did so — that Sir Mountstuart may, on 
receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of " Mon 
siege est fait"; but I am sure he would be the first to 
admit that the cases were different. I do not myself 
think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete 
grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which 
some critics aim at but which few achieve. His im- 
patience — here perhaps half implied and later openly 
avowed — of the historic estimate in literature, would of 
itself have m.ade this process irksome to him. But on 
the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was 
not only irksome, it was unnecessary. His function 
was to mark the special — perhaps it would be safer to 
say a special — tendency of his man, and to bring that 
out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, 
fascinating rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain 
favourite axioms and general principles. This function 
would not have been assisted — I think it nearly certain 
that it would have been hampered and baulked — by 
that attempt to find " the whole " which the Greek 
philosopher and poet so sadly and so truly declares that 
few boast to find. It was a side, a face, a phase of each 
man and writer, that he wished to bring out; and, 
though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his ex- 

G 



98 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

aggeration was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out some- 
thing he had to block out much. If he had attempted 
to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine, the whole 
Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been 
difficult if not impossible to group and to compare in 
the fashion in which he wished to deal with them. 

And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely 
a fallacy, that siippressio veri is always and not 
only sometimes siiggestio falsi, I do not see that he ex- 
ceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was 
wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He 
wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he 
knew perfectly well there is nothing the average English- 
man dislikes so much as guarded and elaborately con- 
ditioned statements. The immense popularity and 
influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of 
half-lights, of "perhapses"; and Httle as Mr Arnold 
liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow 
his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes too 
many provisos, if he " buts " too much, if he attempts to 
paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be 
accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with 
timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for 
wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles 
of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often 
be considered tedious or impertinent. The opposite 
plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head 
till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much 
Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play 



1 862- 1 86/. 99 

of the first was far more graceful and far less mono- 
tonous : yet it was hammer - play all the same. But 
we must return to our Letters. 

A dinner with Lord Houghton — "all the advanced 
Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full 
costume " — a visit to Cambridge and a stroll to Grant 
Chester, notice of about the first elaborate appreciation 
of his critical work which had appeared in England, the 
article by the late Mr S. H. Reynolds in the Westmm- 
ster Review for October 1863, visits to the Roths- 
childs at Aston Clinton and Mentmore, and interesting 
notices of the composition of the Joiibert., the French 
Eton., Szc, fill up the year. The death of Thackeray 
extracts one of those criticisms of his great contempo- 
raries which act as little douches from time to time, in 
the words, " I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, 
though we were on friendly terms : and he was not to 
my mind a great writer." But the personal reflections 
which follow are of value. He finds " the sudden ces- 
sation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To- 
day I am forty-one ; the middle of life in any case, and 
for me perhaps much more than the middle. I have 
ripened and am ripening so slowly that I should be glad 
of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice 
to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to 
gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks, 
if they must come, however rough. But of this inward 
spring one must not talk [it is only to his mother that 
he writes this] for it does not like being talked about, 



lOO MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in 
mystery." 

An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, 
as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. 
"It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the 
spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches," 
he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much 
that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind 
him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. 
He " means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand 
of their Dissenting ministers," and in the interval wants 
to know how "that beast of a word 'waggonette' is 
spelt ? " The early summer was spent at Woodford, on 
the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at 
Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the 
Celtic race " quite overpower " him. Alas ! some other 
poetry did not, and when we find him in September 
thinking Enoch Arden " perhaps the best thing Tenny- 
son has done," we are not surprised to find this remark- 
able special appreciation followed by a general depreci- 
ation, which is quite in keeping. He is even tempted 
(and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, 
but justly repHes, " How is that possible ? " 

From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices 
of the EssaySy and a pleasant and full account of a second 
official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at 
most of the Western and Central European capitals. 
The tour lasted from April to November, and I have 
sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better 



1862-1867. lOI 

idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large 
seem to have given. Early in 1866 we hear of the be- 
ginnings of the Friendship s Garland series, though the 
occasion for that name did not come till afterwards. 
And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of 
the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dork- 
ing, while he caught " a salmon " in the Deveron during 
September. 

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words 
on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, 
though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental 
letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The author 
of the Vie de Jesus was a very slightly younger man than 
Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence 
of his having left the seminary and begun early to live 
by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his 
English compeer in literary repute. His contributions 
to the Debats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to 
be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable 
single book, Averroes et PAverro'is?ne, dates from that year. 
I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted 
with his written work. But they actually met in 1859, 
during the business of the Foreign Education Commis- 
sion, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter 
to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells 
his sister of " Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in 
Paris," and notes the considerable resemblance between 
their lines of endeavour, observing, however, that Renan 
is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense 



I02 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of the word, on the French," while he is trying to incul- 
cate intelligence on the English. After which he makes 
a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la 
Foesie des Races Celtiques, the literary results of which we 
shall soon see. I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever 
expressed to his intimates — he has not to my knowledge 
left any published expressions of it — what he thought of 
those later and very peculiar developments of " morality 
in a high sense of the word" which culminated in the 
Abbesse de Jouarre and other things. His sense of 
humour must have painfully suggested to him that his 
own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become 
one of the most conspicuous examples of that French 
lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was 
no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect. In 
others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am 
bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous. In liter 
ary criticism Mr x\rnold needed no teaching from M. 
Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides pre- 
served him from the Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, 
so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses 
of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred history. 
But he copied a great deal too much of his master's 
dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall 
see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. 
Renan's (I am told) not particularly well-informed and 
(I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about 
Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too 
much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even 



I 



1 862- 1 86/. 103 

as M. Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of 
sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly 
phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical 
and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities 
that Mr Arnold wanted ; sweetness and light he could 
not want. 

As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as 
he began to loathe examination papers more and more 
(indeed I know no one to whom usus coticimiat amorem 
in the case of these documents), he made some en- 
deavours to obtain employment which might be, if not 
both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one 
or the other. First he tried for a Charity Commissioner- 
ship j then for the librarianship of the House of Com- 
mons. For the former post it may be permitted to 
think that his extremely strong — in fact partisan — 
opinions, both on education and on the Church of 
England, were a most serious disqualification ; his ap- 
pointment to the latter would have been an honour to 
the House and to England, and would have shown that 
sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right 
place. But he got neither. He delivered his last Ox- 
ford lecture in the summer term of 1867. I remcmbef 
that there w^ere strong undergraduate hopes that Mr 
Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to 
succeed him ; but it was decided that the honorary 
qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were 
other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of " send-oif ' 
in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, 



I04 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, 
and the close of his professorial career was further made 
memorable by the issue of the Study of Celtic Literature 
in prose and the New Poe7ns in verse, with Schools and 
Universities 07i the Continent to follow next year. Of 
these something must be said before this chapter is 
closed. 

On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book 
of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of 
view, we may take rather serious objections. That it 
has merits not affected by these objections need hardly 
be said ; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say 
that it is — or was — even the superior of the Homer 
in comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr 
Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon 
new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter ; in 
this he was leading them to conquest of new realms. 
Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, 
this expansion, of which English was then in most 
need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of con- 
centration and retreat upon the older acquisitions. 

So far so good ; but if we go farther, we do not 
at first fare better. It would be grossly unjust to 
charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has 
since been talked about Celtic Renascences ; but I 
fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his ac- 
count. In particular, he set an example, which has 
in this and other matters been far too widely fol- 
lowed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. 



1 862- 1 86/. 105. 

It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the 
literary equivalent of a "revoke" — the literary act 
after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not 
play with a man — is speaking of authors and books 
which he has not read and cannot read in the orig- 
inal, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. 
This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never 
have committed. But short of it, and while escaping 
its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely 
even of what he confesses that he does not know ; 
and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own 
(acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of 
the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was 
here guilty. 

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr 
Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say : he frankly 
enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely 
limited. But what is really surprising, is that he 
does not seem to have taken much trouble to ex- 
tend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads 
and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, 
he seems to have consulted : he never, I think, 
names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as 
the greatest of Celtic poets ; and in the main his 
citations are derived either from Ossian (" this do 
seem going far," as an American poetess observes), 
or else from the Mabi?togion, where some of the 
articles are positively known to be late translations 
of French - English originals, and the others are very 



Io6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary 
generalisations on so very small a basis of such very 
shaky matter. In fact, Mr Arnold's argument for 
the presence of " Celtic magic," &c., in Celtic poetry 
comes to something like this. "There is a quahty 
of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c. ; this magic 
must be Celtic : therefore it must be in Celtic 
poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I 
am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only 
say that two sentences give the key-note of the book 
as argument. " Rhyme itself, all the weight of evi- 
dence tends to show, came into our poetry from the 
Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence 
tends to show that it came from the Latins. " Our 
only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the 
German." Now at the time (1867), for more than 
thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of 
the first or the second class except Heine, who, as 
Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German 
but a Jew. 

But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for 
is not fact, it is not argument, it is not even learning. 
It is phrase, attitude, style, that by which, as he says 
admirably in this very book, " what a man has to say 
is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add 
dignity and distinction to it." It is the new critical 
attitude, the appreciation of literary beauty in and for 
itself, the sense of "the word," the power of discern- 
ing and the power of reflecting charm, the method 



1 862- 1 86/. 107 

not more different from the wooden deduction of the 
old school of critics than from the merely unenlight- 
ened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his 
earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless " I like 
that " and " I don't like this " which does duty now, 
and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. 
True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, 
haphazard ; true, he might often be absolutely unable 
to give any real reason for the faith that was in him ; 
true, he sometimes might have known more than he 
did know about his subject. But in all these points 
he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace and 
charm that sometimes attend caprice ; in his want of 
reason, by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occa- 
sional lack of the fullest knowledge, by the admirable 
use — not merely display — which he made of what 
knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of 
the two books of his lectures in which it is not pos- 
sible to find some opportunity for disagreement — some- 
times pretty grave disagreement; but I am sure that 
no two more valuable books, in their kind and sub- 
ject, to their country and time, have been ever issued 
from the press. 

The New Poems make a volume of unusual import- 
ance in the history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold 
lived more than twenty years after the date of their 
publication ; but his poetical production during that 
time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he 
was a man of forty-five — an age at which the poetical 



I08 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

impulse has been supposed to run Jow, but perhaps 
with no sufficient reason. Poets of such very differ- 
ent types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced 
work equal to their best, if not actually their best, 
at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years 
before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest 
volumes, Me7i and Wome?t and Dramatis Personce^ the 
one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two. According 
to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as 
depending upon the subject and upon the just and 
artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be 
too late. 

Certainly this age was not too late with him. The 
contents all answered strictly enough to their title, 
except that Evipedocles on Etna and some half-dozen 
of its companions were, at Mr Browning's request, 
reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 
1852, and that Thy r sis ^ St B randan, A Southern 
Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made maga- 
zine appearances. Again the moment was most im- 
portant. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting 
with an apology the " transient and embarrassed 
phantom" of Merope) an appearance in 1855, the 
transition age of English nineteenth - century poetry 
was in full force. No one's place was safe but 
Tennyson's ; and even his was denied by some, in- 
cluding Mr Arnold himself, who never got bis eyes 
quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, thoueh 
he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had 



1 862- 1 86/. 109 

them allowed ; the Spasmodics had not disappeared ; the 
great prse-Raphaelite school was but on the way. The 
critics knew not what to think ; the vulgar thought 
(to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both 
classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected 
Men a?id Women : The Defence of Guinevere had not 
yet rung the matins - bell in the ears of the new 
generation. 

Now things were all altered. The mixture of popu- 
larity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden 
volume — the title poem and Aylmer^s Field for some, 
The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets 
for others — had put Tennyson's place 

" Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men." 

The three-volume collection of Browning's Poems^ and 
Dramatis Fersonce which followed to clench it, had 
nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The De- 
fence of Guineve?'e and The Life and Death of Jason ^ 
Atala7ita, Chastelard, and most of all the Foe?ns and 
Ballads^ had launched an entirely new poetical school 
with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the 
world. The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper 
cult had been nearly (not yet quite) laughed out of 
existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had had 
any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be 
said ; but they were read by those who were or were 
shortly to be themselves read. You had not to look 
far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cam- 



no MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

bridge) before you found them on those undergraduate 
shelves which mean so much ; while many who, from 
general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them 
not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their 
author's prose work, or at least knew him as one 
whom others knew. 

The volume itself was well calculated to take ad- 
vantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this con- 
junction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal 
of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or per- 
emptory order. And it might be contended that this 
collection contains nothing quite up to the very best 
things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, 
to llie Scholar -Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas. But 
with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to 
send them to these earlier things than to remind them 
thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, 
and strong. 

In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight con- 
sciousness of " the silver age." The prefatory Stanzas, 
a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of 
Poetry, sound this note — 

" Though the Muse be gone away, 
Tliough she move not earth to-day, 
Souls, erewhile who caught her word, 
Ah ! still harp on what they heard." 

A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses 
were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to 
juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to 



I 



I862-I867. Ill 

seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual 
contents were more than reassuring. Of Empedodes 
it is not necessary to speak again : Thyrsis could not 
but charm. The famous line, 

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires," 

sets the key dangerously high ; but it is kept by the 
magnificent address to the cuckoo, 

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?' 

and the flower-piece that follows ; by that other single 
masterpiece, 

" The coronals of that forgotten time ; " 
by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning 
"And long the way appears which seemed so short ; " 

by the Signal tree ; and by the allegoric close with the 
reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by 
themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even 
in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the 
richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822. 

Saint Brandan^ which follows, has pathos if not great 
power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic 
and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and 
occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the 
next division might be variously judged. None of 
them equals the Shakespeare ; and one may legitimately 
hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially 
Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples have always 
been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, 



112 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

action of intense poetic feeling — Shakespeare's, Milton's, 
Wordsworth's, Rossetti's — and intensity was not Mr 
Arnold's characteristic. Yet Austerity of Poetry^ East 
Lofidon, and Mo?ttca's Last Prayer must always stand 
so high in the second class that it is hardly critical 
weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide 
rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, 
but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. 
Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and assumptions 
may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as 
an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so 
certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the 
order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter 
little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not 
the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which 
makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very 
best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of 
life, which is so different a thing from the criticism 
of it ; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art 
of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, 
and which prose literature never attains except by a 
tour de force ; that almost more marvellous accompani- 
ment of vowel and consonant music, independent of 
the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of 
English poetry among all, and of nineteenth -century 
poetry among all English poetries. As is the case 
with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr 
Arnold — it is as natural to great English poets to 
leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close 



1862-1867. 113 

of their verse as it was to Dante to end with " stars." 
But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, 
nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any 
time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with 
some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the 
sentiment and admires the poem ; and for my part I 
find in Dover Beach^ even without the Merman, without 
the Scholar- Gipsy, without Isolatio?i, a document which 
I could be content to indorse " Poetry, sans phrased 
The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, 
but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in 
Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and 
in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The 
Fragfjient of Chorus of a Dejaiieira, written long be- 
fore, but now first published, has the usual faults of 
Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse. It is really quite im- 
possible, when one reads such stuff as — 

" Thither in your adversity 
Do you betake yourselves for light, 
But strangely misinterpret all you hear. 
For you will not put on 
New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe 
And purged considerate minds " — 

not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference 
between this and the following — 

" To college in the pursuit of duty 
Did I betake myself for lecture ; 
But very soon I got extremely wet, 
For I had not put on 
The stout ulster appropriate to Britain, 
And my umbrella was at home." 

H 



114 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

But Palladium^ if not magnificent, is reconciling, the 
Shakespearian YouthJs Agitations beautiful, and Groiv- 
ing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror. It 
is the reply, the vcj-neimtng^ to Browning's magnificent 
Rabhi beji Ez7'a, and one has almost to fly to that 
stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But 
it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of 
weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, 
by The Last Word. The Li?ies writtejt in Kensington 
Gardens (which had appeared with Empedocles., but 
were missed above) may be half saddened, half en- 
deared to some by their own remembrance of the 
"black -crowned red-boled " giants there celebrated — 
trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good- 
natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the 
gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots 
without natural comfort and protection. And then, 
after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely 
poetical. Epilogue to Lessiiig's Laocoon leads us to one 
of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, 
Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable 
has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has 
poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of 
the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But 
it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really 
poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. 
And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between 
cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly. For a 
little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity 



1862-1867. ii5 

about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we 
not have given ! what volumes of polemic wiih the 
Gnardiafi and amateur discussions of the Gospel of 
St John ! In the first place, note the metrical struc- 
ture, the sober level octosyllables of the overture 
changing suddenly to a dance - measure which, for a 
wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic 
movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of 

" The famous orators have shone, 
The famous poets sung and gone," 

and so on for nearly half a score of lines ! How perfect 
the sad contrast of the refrain — 

'' Ah ! so the qtiiet was ! 
So was the hush / " 

how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture 
of the opening ! how riotous the famous irruption of the 
New Agers ! how adequate the quiet moral of the end, 
that the Past is as the Present, and more also ! And 
then he went and wTote about Bottles ! 
" Progress," with a splendid opening — ■ 

" The master stood upon the mount and saw- 
He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes," — 

conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. 
In the first, Rugby Chapel^ the intensity of feeling 
is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplish- 
ment. The other is the still better Heine^s Grave, 
and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines 



Il6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

about the " weary Titan," which are among the best 
known of their author's, and form at once the motto 
and the stigma of mid -century Liberal poUcy. And 
then the book is concluded by two other elegies — in 
rhyme this time — The Statizas ivritten at the Gra?ide 
Chartreuse and Ober7?ian?i otice more. They are, how- 
ever, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, 
and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on " the 
note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive 
and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were 
a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. 

The third book — Schools a?id Universities o?i the Con- 
tinent (1868) — in which are put the complete results of 
the second Continental exploration — is, I suppose, much 
less known than the non-professional work, though per- 
haps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on 
elementary education. By far the larger part of it — 
the whole, indeed, except a "General Conclusion" of 
some forty pages — is a reasoned account of the actual 
state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzer- 
land. It is not exactly judicial ; for the conclusion — 
perhaps the foregone conclusion — obviously colours 
every page. But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, 
is all its author's non - popular wTiting) of clear and 
orderly exposition — never arranged ad captanduin^ but 
also never "dry." Indeed there certainly are some 
tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a 
distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered 
graces of some of the rest. 



1862-1867. 117 

Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book 
as a lesson, or as an argument. Mr Arnold had started 
with a strong belief in the desirableness — indeed of the 
necessity — of State-control of the most thoroughgoing 
kind in education ; and he was not at all likely to miss 
the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very 
arsenals and places d\irvies of that system. He was 
thoroughly convinced that English ways generally, and 
especially the ways of English schools and colleges, 
were wrong ; and he had, of course, no difficulty in 
pointing triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions 
of Continental countries differed in some ways from 
each other, they all differed in nearly the same way 
from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for him — 
by those who see any force in the argument — that 
events have followed him. Education, both secondary 
and university in England, has to a large extent gone 
since on the lines he indicates ; the threatened superi- 
ority of the German bagman has asserted itself even 
more and more ; the " teaching of literature " has 
planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges. 
But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of 
corroboration is rather imaginary. That a thing has 
happened does not prove that it ought to have hap- 
pened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts 
" conduct " out of sight altogether. There are those 
who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, 
urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled 
us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with 



Il8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the system which gave France the authors of the 
debacle; that the successes of Germany over France 
in war have no necessary connection with education, 
and those of Germany over England in commerce, 
diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further 
— some of them — and ask whether the Continental 
practices and the Arnoldian principles do not necessi- 
tate divers terribly large and terribly ill-based assump- 
tions, as that all men are educabk^ that the value of 
education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or 
at least most, subjects are capable of being made edu- 
cational instruments, and a great many more. 

On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that 
Mr Arnold never succumbed to that senseless belief in 
examination which has done, and is doing, such infinite 
harm. But they will add to the debit side that the 
account of English university studies Vv^hich ends the 
book was even at the time of writing so inaccurate as 
to be quite incomprehensible, unless we suppose that 
Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own youth, 
and not of those with complete accuracy. He says " the 
examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we 
place at the end of our three years' university course, is 
merely the Abiturienten-exaniefi of Germany, the epreiive 
du baccalaureat of France, placed in both those countries 
at the entrance to university studies " ; and it is by this 
that he justifies Signor Matteucci's absurd description of 
Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lycees. Now, in the 
first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, 



1 862- 1 86/. 119 

cr in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole 
book, about the Honours system, which for very many 
years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely 
higher in the case of a very large proportion of men. 
And in the second place, there is not a word about the 
Scholarship system, which in the same way had for 
very many -years provided an entrance standard actually 
higher — far higher in some ways — than the condudiitg 
examinations of the French baccalaiiriat. My own days 
at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr 
Arnold's book. During that time there were always in 
the university some 400 men who had actually obtained 
scholarships on this standard ; and a very consider- 
able number who had competed on it, and done fairly. 
Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about 
the abolition of the pass-man altogether, I do not know. 
But he ought to have known, and I should think he 
must have known, that at the time of his writing the 
mere and sheer pass-man — the man whose knov.'ledge 
was represented by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and 
Greats — was, if not actually in a minority, — in some 
colleges at least he was that — at any rate in a pretty 
bare majority. With his love of interference and control, 
he might have retorted that this did not matter, that 
the university permitted every one to stick to the 
minimum. But as a matter of fact he suggests that it 
provided no alternative, no maximum or majus at all. 

By the time that we have now reached, that of his 
giving up the professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, 



I20 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

for good and for evil, mostly fixed. When he took up 
the duties of his chair he was, though by no means a 
very young man and already the author of much remark- 
able work, yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a 
small official circle in London. He had now, at forty- 
five, not exactly popularity, but a very considerable, and 
a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the most 
and the best of his poetry was written ; but it was only 
just coming to be at all generally read or at all justly 
appreciated. He had, partly in obeying, and partly in 
working against his official superiors, acquired a distinct 
position as an educational reformer. He had become 
something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had 
proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had ex- 
emplified with remarkable and varied skill, a new or at 
least a very greatly altered kind of literary criticism. And 
this had already threatened incursions into domains 
from which men of letters as such had generally kept 
aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched 
not as men of letters. Something of Socrates, some- 
thing of Addison, something of Johnson, mingled in Mr 
Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not exactly an 
arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all things, 
poetry and poHtics, prose ^nd polite manners, pubhc 
thought, public morality, religion itself. These preten- 
sions, if urged in a less agreeable manner, would have 
been intolerable ; they were not universally tolerated as 
it was : but the gifts and graces of the critic made them 
• — so far — inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all save 



1 862- 1 86/. 121 

the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and 
to some even of these. 

And we must remember that this appearance of Mr 
Arnold as the mild and ingenious tamer of the ferocious 
manners of Britons coincided with far wider and more 
remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, 
of the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least 
as much to infringe the authority of his enemy the 
Philistine, as the first had done to break the power of 
the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian. This was the 
time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised 
power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, 
and to bring about a considerable rearrangement of Mr 
Arnold's own ideas as to the respective greatness of 
foreign nations. And finally the walls of another 
stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently 
impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap 
money and so forth, were tottering and crumbling. A 
blast against them — indeed a series of blasts from 
Chartism to the Latter-day Pamphlets — had been blown 
long before by Carlyle, in very different tones from 
Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest champion 
and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But 
Sadowa and household suffrage gave the final summons, 
if not the final shake. Mr Arnold had done his best to 
co-operate ; but his object, to do him justice, was to be 
rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an over- 
thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He 
set about, in all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish 



122 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

and begin the re-edification ; unluckily, in but too many 
cases, with dubious judgment, and by straying into 
quarters where he had no vocation. But he never 
entirely neglected his real business and his real voca- 
tion, and fortunately he returned to them almost en- 
tirely before it was too late. 



123 



CHAPTER IV. 



N THE WILDERNESS. 



That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professor- 
ship of Poetry was a most important epoch in his life 
is sufficiently evident. In the ten years that came to 
an end then, he had, as two such extremely competent 
judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different 
ways told him/ passed from comparative obscurity into 

^ Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 
100). They were actually : "At that time [when they had met at 
Lord Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] . . . you your- 
self were little known. Now you are well known. You have made 
a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future 
before you, and you deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older 
acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, 
that "he shouldn't dare to be intimate " with so clever a young man 
as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in Febmary 
1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenceum, and asked "which 
of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me 
my great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which 
he answered : ' Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes 
the books.' " The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the 
speaker's own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold 
rightly considered the Essays to be "the book that got him his 
reputation," will be found in Letters^ i. 351. 



124 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

something more than comparative prominence. His 
chair had been for him a real cathedra^ and his deliver- 
ances from it had always assumed, and had at length, to 
a great extent, achieved, real authority. In criticism it 
was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel 
aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record 
aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, 
most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criti- 
cism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual 
popularity, yet into something like attention. His 
attempts to obtain some other employment less irk- 
some, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed 
been unsuccessful ; but he was rising in his own de- 
partment, and his work, if still in part uncongenial 
and decidedly laborious, appears to have been much 
less severe than in earlier days. Partly this work it- 
self, partly his writings, and partly other causes had 
opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance, 
which it was in his own power to extend or contract 
as he pleased. His domestic life was perfectly happy, 
if his means were not very great : and his now as- 
sured literary position made it easy for him to in- 
crease these means, not indeed largely, but to a not 
despicable extent, by writing. The question was, 
" What should he write ? " 

It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done 
anything different from that which he has done. With- 
out being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well 
convinced tnat the actual conduct is the joint result of 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 125 

abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise 
them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, 
would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But 
I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at 
this moment I should have arranged it differently. He 
should have given us more poems — the man who, far 
later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such 
a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in 
his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite 
essays, as many as De Quincey's or as Sainte-Beuve's 
own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the Heine 
and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the 
Byro?i later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty- 
one years' lease of life upon which he now entered, he 
should not have produced a volume a-year of these, — 
there are more than enough subjects in the various 
literatures that he knew ; and though it is possible that 
in such extended application his method might have 
proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, 
it is not likely. To complete the thing, I should have 
given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at 
Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably 
fitted. But Dis aliter visum : at least it seemed other- 
wise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his I'terary 
employments were concerned, and the gods did not 
interfere. 

We have seen that he had, some years before, con- 
ceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of 
England on a good many points by no means merely 



126 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

literary ; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to 
have thought that now was the time to apply seriously 
to that work. His tenure of the Oxford chair had 
given him the public ear ; and the cessation of that 
tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which 
it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert 
and acute mind than his must have seen that the 
Reform troubles of 1866 and the "leap in the dark" 
of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes 
indeed at home ; and that the war of the first-named 
year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He 
at least thought — and there was some justification of a 
good many kinds for him in thinking — that intellectual 
changes, of importance equal to the political, were 
coming or come upon the world. And so for a 
time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the 
Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves. Social, 
political, and religious matters tempted him away from 
literature ; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be 
said that he had anything to do with her except to take 
her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it 
was by far his most popular, volume. 

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages 
in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is 
at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of 
Mr Arnold's official employment. For nearly twenty 
years he had been constantly thrown into contact with 
the English Dissenters ; and, far earlier than the time 
which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar 



IN THE V7ILDERNESS. 127 

phrase, to have "got upon his nerves," but to have 
affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent — or, 
at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His 
Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the aver- 
age middle-class household thirty or forty years ago ; 
though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is 
not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle- 
class household. The religion which Mr Arnold at- 
tacks is not the religion of the Church of England at 
all, or only of what was even then a decaying and un- 
influential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant 
sect of the Evangehcals. Once more, I cannot from 
personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true 
of Dissent, but I can believe it. 

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English 
Dissenter is and was absurd. Politically, indeed, he 
had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, 
from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond 
of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great 
extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To 
take the average manager of a " British " school as 
the average representative of the British nation was 
the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet 
this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade 
between 1867 and 1877. 

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no 
doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very 
reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. Culture 
and its Enetnies^ which was the origin and first part, so 



128 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

to say, of Culture and A?iarchy, carried the campaign 
begun in the Essays in Criticism forward ; but only 
in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly 
due to the fact of the author's expressed, and very 
natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial 
exercises with the bocca dolce. Still this is at least con- 
ceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of 
the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at 
least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable 
time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed 
before the publication of the lecture as an article in 
the Cornhill w\is followed up by the series from the 
latter month to August, which bore the general title 
of Anarchy and Authority^ and completed the material 
of Culture and Anarchy itself. This, as a book, ap- 
peared in 1869. 

It began, according to the author's favourite manner, 
which was already passing into something like a 
mannerism, with a sort of half- playful, half -serious 
battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic 
Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead 
one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had 
blasphemed "the cant about culture," and Mr Arnold 
protests that culture's only aim is in the Bishop's words, 
" to make reason and the will of God prevail." In the 
first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature 
by its title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and 
Light," we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph 
and the Nonconformist. Then the general view is laid 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 29 

down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with 
more of a political than a religious bent, and with the 
political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect. 

" Doing as one Likes '"' scatters a mild rain of ridicule 
on this supposed fetich of all classes in England ; and 
then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, 
nickname -classification of " Barbarian -Philistine -Popu- 
lace" is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter 
to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes 
are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially 
and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part 
of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, 
which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a 
run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, " Heb- 
raism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on 
which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to 
make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly 
in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The 
opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that 
"Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth 
at any price, and " Hebraism " the love of goodness at 
any price ; but the actual difference is not far from this, 
or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity 
and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr 
Carlyle about Socrates being " terribly at ease in Zion," 
the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renais- 
sance, and so forth. " Porro unum est necessarium," 
a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather holds up another 
side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh 

I 



130 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

direction ; and then " Our Liberal Practitioners " brings 
it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is 
the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also 
to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away 
from them ; though from what followed it would seem 
that he could only have done so by some such tour de 
force as the famous " clubhauling " in Peter Simple. 
Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would 
have been, though very far from its author's master- 
piece, an interesting document both in regard to his 
own mental history and that of England during the 
third quarter of the century, containing some of his 
best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense. 

But your crusader — still more your anti-crusader — 
never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this 
crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, 
still in the Cornhill., — completing it by further instal- 
ments in the same place later in the year, and pub- 
lishing it in 1870, — the book called St Paul and Pro- 
testantism., where he necessarily exchanges the mixed 
handling of Culture and Anarchy for a dead-set at the 
religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The 
point of at least ostensible connection — of real de- 
parture — is taken from the " Hebraism and Hellenism " 
contrast of the earher book ; and the same contrast is 
strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda., "A 
Comment on Christmas." But this contrast is gradually 
shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on 
its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of " conduct " of 



IN THE WILDERNESS. I3I 

morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards 
the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique ; 
in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian 
Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, 
is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the 
" Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than 
hinted that one of the most important operations of 
this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is 
perfectly serious — its seriousness, indeed, is quite evi- 
dently deUberate and laboured, so that the author 
does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still 
admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and 
reverent ; no exception can be taken to it on the score 
of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of ortho- 
doxy from the one side, where no doubt the author 
would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, 
history, and the needs of human nature on the other, 
where no doubt his " not guilty " would be equally 
emphatic. 

The case is again altered, and very unfortunately 
altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been 
said, the most famous of the series — its zenith at once 
and its nadir — Literature and Dogitia. A very much 
smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form ; 
indeed, the contents of St Paul a?id Protestantism itself 
must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong 
sympathies on the part of the editor could have ob- 
tained admission for any part of Literature a?id Dogma, 
Much of it must have been written amid the excitement 



132 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of the French-Prussian War, when the English public 
was athirst for " skits " of all sorts, and when Mr 
Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in 
the composition of much of the matter of Friendship's 
Garland. St Paul and Protestantism had had two 
editions in the same year {Culture a?id A?iarchy^ a far 
better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether 
the state of things was such as to invite any author to 
pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he 
might at first flatter himself that he had caught the 
one and made cyclone-use of the other ; for the book, 
appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, 
passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 
1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far 
Mr Arnold's most popular book ; I repeat also that it 
is quite his worst. 

That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there — 
in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out 
the most famous passage of the book, to which accord- 
ingly we need here only allude — can be denied by no- 
body except those persons who hold "good form" to 
be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British 
delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision 
of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations 
and illustrations " which he confesses to having ex- 
cluded from the popular edition, may give us the wel- 
come leave to deal very briefly with this side of the 
matter in other respects also. We may pass over the 
fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 33 

(who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate 
a logician) on the theory of causation ; with the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge about ho?mmi?n divomque volun- 
tas ahna Venus (I have forgotten what was the bear- 
ing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring 
into) ; with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Per- 
sonality of God ; with the Athanasian Creed, and its 
" science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as 
"form," class themselves; one mutters something well 
known about risu inepto^ and passes on. Such a tone 
on such a subject can only be carried off completely by 
the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is 
well enough in keeping with the merely negative and 
destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to 
bring Literature and DogTna into competition with A 
Tale oj a Tub ; it would be more than unjust to 
bring it into comparison with Le Taureau bla?ic. And 
neither comparison is necessary, because the great 
fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it 
is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful 
taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition. 
In the first place, the child-like fashion in \Yhich Mr 
Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable 
" science," Biblical criticism, has always struck some 
readers w4th astonishment and a kind of terror. This 
new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu 
Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of 
literature than almost any that can be found. "The 
prophecy of the details of Peter's death," we are told in 



134 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Literature and Dogma, " is almost certainly an addition 
after the event, because it is not at all in the manner 
ofJesusT Observe that we have absolutely no details, 
no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels 
for the " manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at 
least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in 
a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost 
absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge 
by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact 
of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you 
must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very 
same documents, resting on the very same authority, 
what, according to your good pleasure, is " in the 
manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being 
not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the 
method had not been pushed ad ahsu7'du7n, as it was 
later by his friend M. Renan in the Histoire d^ Israel, to 
the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and un- 
orthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But 
it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of 
this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly. 

Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that 
" miracles do not happen." Alas ! it is Mr Arnold's 
unhappy lot that if miracles do happen his argument 
confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not 
happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost 
all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor 
Huxley in another division, he appears not to com- 
prehend what, to the believers in the supernatural. 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 35 

the supernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, 
the tests of the natural, and says, " Now really, you know, 
these tests are destructive." He says — he cannot prove 
— that miracles do not happen now ; his adversaries, if 
they were wise, would simply answer, ^'■ApresV Do 
any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His 
methods shall be always the same, or that those methods 
shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of 
Charters? that He shall give "a good title," like a man 
who is selling a house ? Some at least would rather not ; 
they would feel appallingly little interest in a Divinity after 
this sworn -attorney and chartered -accountant fashion, 
who must produce vouchers for all His acts. And 
further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom 
they do worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in 
the words of a prophet of Mr Arnold's own — 

" Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, 
Nicht Mir ! " 

But this is not all. There is not only begging of 
the question but ignoring of the issue. Literature and 
Dogma, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in inten- 
tion at any rate, a destructive book. It is meant, and 
meant very seriously, to be constructive — to provide a 
substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, 
of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and 
Wesley and Mr Miall. This new religion is to have for 
its Jachin Literature — that is to say, a delicate aesthetic 
appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out 



136 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of it ; and for its Boaz Conduct — that is to say, a morality 
at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though 
more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is any- 
thing like licence; and in the very book itself Mr 
Arnold formulated, against his once (and still partly) 
beloved France, something like that denunciation of 
her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more 
plainly still. Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is 
told to mend its ways (indeed there was need for it), and 
the Literature - without - Dogmatist will have to behave 
himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in 
point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee. 

Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it 
will not work. The goods, to use the vulgar but precise 
formula of Enghsh law, "are not of the nature and 
quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants a 
religion of that sort. Conduct is good ; poetic appreci- 
ation is perhaps better, though not for the general. But 
then religion happens to be something different from 
either, though no doubt closely connected with both. 
Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, 
but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the 
story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing ; it is 
a close connection of bread ; but it will not do for a sub- 
stitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for 
the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a 
historical, difficulty about Conduct plus poetic apprecia- 
tion, but viiiins what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in 
a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 37 

ideal as a life -philosopher who was also a poet. He 
knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in 
Athenseus, and though these might be idle scandal, he 
knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing 
intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been 
rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But 
he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reason- 
ableness of Jesus and "the Aberglmibe of the Second 
Advent" to trouble himself with awkward matters of 
this kind at the moment. 

It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble 
himself with them, or with something like them, after- 
wards. The book — a deliberate provocation — naturally 
found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember 
that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel 
could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal 
Newman could, had he been still in the fold. Mr 
Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its 
comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of 
Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have 
said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude 
applauded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series 
did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which 
showed the tone of Literature and JDogma. Indeed, of 
the concluding volumes, God and the Bible and Last 
Essays on Church and Religio7t, the first is an elaborate 
and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection 
of diverse and comparatively " anodyne " essays. It is 
significant — as showing how much of the success of 



138 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Literature and Dogma had been a success of scandal — 
that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popular- 
ity. God and the Bible was never reprinted till the 
popular edition of the series thus far in 1884 ; and Last 
Essays was never reprinted at all, or had not been up 
to the date of the invaluable Bibliography of the works. 
Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of 
the first edition. This cool reception does not discredit 
either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are 
good things in the Last Essays (to which we shall 
return), but the general effect of them is that of a 
man who is withdrawing from a foray, not exactly 
beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is trying 
to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions. 

God and the Bible tells much the same tale. It 
originally appeared by instalments in the Contei7iporary 
Review^ where it must have been something of a choke- 
pear even for the readers of that then young and 
thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the vigour 
of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of 
Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, " replies, duplies, quad- 
ruplies " are apt to be wofuUy tedious reading, and Mr 
Arnold was rather a veles than a triarius of controversy. 
He could harass, but he did not himself stand harass- 
ing very well ; and here he was not merely the object 
of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious 
that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies 
to destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy 
with the rabid anti- Christianity of Clifford, very little 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 39 

with the mere agnosticism of Huxley ; he wanted to be 
allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited 
him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own 
remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, 
and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too 
manifold. One must be stony-hearted not to feel some 
pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an 
orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth 
Gospel whizzes at him ; or as, while he is trying to 
patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary 
Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggress- 
ive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to meta- 
physical theologians. But this interest is but passing. 

In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt 
at liveliness. Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is 
disposed of with a not ungraceful mixture of pity and 
satire ; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not unpleasantly 
rallied ; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert 
Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of 
Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the Anfi-Jacobin. 
But the apologist is not really light-hearted : he cannot 
keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the 
Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam's 
fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of 
it." Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, 
" How do you know that ? On your own calculus, with 
your own estimate of evidence, how is it possible for 
you to know that ? You may, on your principles, say 
that you are insufficiently persuaded that it did happen ; 



I40 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the 
very thing you will not admit) say that it did not 7 
Surely there is some want of intellectual seriousness in 
thus lightly ignoring every rule of law and logic, of 
history and of common-sense ? " 

But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows 
itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the 
fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those 
who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti- 
Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily 
banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the 
rest comfortably : and he has to resort to the strangest 
reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of 
reinforcements from afar. 

The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself 
of flurry and sense of need, is exhibited in his summon- 
ing — of all wonderful things — of Comparative Philology 
to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the criticism on 
his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the 
ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shin- 
ing." The poor plain mind, already staggered by Mr 
Arnold's private revelations as to what did 7iot happen 
6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite 
succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. 
One had thought that the results of philology and ety- 
mology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to 
be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, 
and till the next guess comes, but nothing more. Lo ! 
they are quoted as if they were on a par with " two and 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 141 

two make four," or the law of Excluded Middle. We 
may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, 
but Curtius and Professor Max Miiller may speak, and 
we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying 
to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to " the roots 
as, bhu^ and sta^ 

One is tempted rather to laugh at this j but on some 
sides it is very serious. That no God of any religion can 
be more of a mere hypothesis than as^ bhu, and sta, never 
seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold for one moment, 
nor that he was cutting the throat of his own argument. 
We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and quad- 
ruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that 
the long defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book 
contains is one of the oddest things in all literature. 
What, on Mr Arnold's principles, it matters whether the 
Fourth Gospel was written in the first century, the fourth, 
or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain 
mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as 
anything else its date is quite immaterial. 

The fact is that this severe censor of " learned 
pseudo - science mixed with popular legend," as he 
terms theology, appears to have no idea of the value 
of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the 
Bible is not even to be considered ; but a conjectural 
reconstruction of it by a Dutch critic, without in the 
older cases one jot or tittle of evidence outside the 
covers of the Bible itself, deserves every respect, if not 
reverent acceptance en bloc. Miracles are fictions, and 



142 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre 
never happened ; but as, hhu, and sta are very solemn 
facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, 
because the word Deus means (not " has been guessed 
to mean," but 77ieans) "Shining." That Shakespeare 
knew everything is much more certain than that 
miracles do not happen ; and he certainly knew Mr 
Arnold's case if not Mr Arnold, when he introduced 
a certain main episode in A Midsiiminer Nighfs 
Dream. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom 
is venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as 
popular legend, and the implicit belief in as^ bhu, 
and sta. 

A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not 
dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the 
handles they present are infinite; but for my part I 
shall take leave to say little more about them. To 
ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm 
would be to beg the question in their own manner; 
to ask whether they produced any effect would lead 
us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent ten- 
dency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed 
another ten years and more wherein to escape from 
the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, 
and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have 
not quite done with the other fruits themselves. 

The actual finale. Last Essays on Church and Re- 
ligion^ was still less popular, was indeed the least 
popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been 



IN THE WILDERNESS. I43 

said above, it has never been reprinted. It is easy 
to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of 
his books which can be definitely called dull. The 
apologetic tone noticeable in God and the Bible con- 
tinues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained 
in an even less attractive manner. The Preface is 
perhaps the least dead part of the book ; but its line 
of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the 
controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr 
Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments 
of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor 
de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogjna^ bringing out 
(what surely could have been no news to any but very 
ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not 
at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at 
his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems 
never even to dream of the obvious retort : " Certainly. 
These men are at any rate ' thorough ' ; they are not 
dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have 
got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived 
at their destination. We have no desire to arrive at 
the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, 
we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less 
surprising that he did not see the force of the objec- 
tions of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the 
equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arl)itrarily 
selecting this utterance as that of " Jesus," and an- 
other, given by the same authority, as not that of 
*' Jesus." A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, 



144 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

could never take Mr Arnold's views on Church and 
Religion at all. 

But when we leave the Preface, even such faint 
liveliness as this deserts us. The text contains four 
(or five, the second being divided into two parts) 
essays, lectures, or papers, A Psychological Parallel^ 
Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist^ The Church of Eng- 
land, and A Last Word on the Burials Bill All had 
appeared in Mactnillan^s Magazine or the Contemporary 
Review during 1876, while Bishop Butler had been 
delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and The 
Church of E7tgland as an address to the London 
Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year. 

Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence 
of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the 
analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or 
edification to be got out of the book. The writer, 
though by no means abandoning his own point of 
view, and even flattering himself that some modus 
Vivendi is about to be established between himself 
and the more moderate supporters of the Church and 
of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-ex- 
cusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of dis- 
content and weariness — nay, even a fretfulness such 
as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim 
who could not bring water out of the rock. A 
Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the 
apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views 
on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and 



IN THE WILDERNESS. I45 

Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by 
the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not Hve to 
see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desid- 
erated a good one). Of course the argument is sun- 
clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St 
Paul may Viave been mistaken about the Resurrection. 
Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the Book of 
Enoch, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., 
&c. And it would be out of place to attempt any reply 
to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun- 
clear as the argument itself. No believer in super- 
natural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew 
Hale to have been inspired ; and no believer in the 
divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of 
words (if He did adopt them) makes them His. 

The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less 
clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be suc- 
cinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires 
rather careful " collection " in order to discover what 
our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I 
should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is 
by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, 
perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold's hearers 
must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact 
drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece 
when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, 
for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct 
notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that 
Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted 

K 



146 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

with the eighteenth -century hmitations by the Zeit- 
Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German com- 
pound at the head of every other one of them, seem a 
good deal for teUing us this. If it is a sort of indirect 
attack upon — an obHque demurrer to — Butler's con- 
structive - aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and re- 
ligion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, 
that it is a case of ifjipar congressus, and secondly, that 
the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair 
chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very 
large pages, and a German word at the top of the 
alternate ones, to do that ! In the opening sketch of 
Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable 
and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant 
promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow ; 
but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy- 
three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to 
say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then 
have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy 
satisfactorily, Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly 
inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do 
not happen, and that prophecies were either not made 
or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of But whether 
he is got rid of, — whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist 
have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated 
object, — that is another question. 

The two remaining essays show us Air Arnold, in his 
character of at least would-be practical statesman, deal- 
ing no longer with points of doctrine out with the affairs 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 147 

of the Church as a political body. The circumstances 

of the first — the address delivered at Sion College — had 
a certain piquancy : whether they had also sweet reason- 
ableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of 
things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. 
Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little 
grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, 
always occupies a rather equivocal position when he 
addresses experts and the profession ; but his position 
is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of 
non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold 
succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not 
propose to examine at any length. He thought himself 
that he had " sufficiently marked the way in which the 
new world was to be reached." Paths to new worlds 
are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-read- 
ing, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years 
after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum 
appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that 
things of general are of no consequence. The Church 
is better than Dissent ; at least she would be so if she 
dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her super- 
stitions about the rights of property and "my duty to 
my neighbour," and as much as possible of the barriers 
which separate her from Dissent itself A most moderate 
eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill 
paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to 
the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had 
been referred to. The particular question, in this 



148 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

phase of it. has long ceased to burn, and one need 
not disturb the ashes. 

We must now turn to the incursions of this time into 
politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. 
The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted 
Friendship's Garland, which has always had some ferv- 
ent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so hap- 
pened that the period when Essays in Criticism, com- 
bined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold 
to the public, was the period of the first years of the 
Fall Mall Gazette, when that brilliant periodical, with 
the help of many of the original staff of the Saturday 
Review, and others, was renewing for the sixties the 
sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the 
Saturday itself had given to the fifties, while its form 
and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. 
As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation 
into which the public mind had been thrown by the 
astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian 
successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had 
begun a series of letters, couched in the style of 
persiflage, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintro- 
duced, twenty years earlier in Eotheii, and which the 
Saturday had taken up and widely developed. He also 
took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the 
Latterday Famphlets. And for some years at intervals, 
with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents 
and co77iparses — Arminius von Thundertentronckh, 
Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph, the Bottles 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 149 

family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their 
deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of 
more or less celebrated personages of the day, intro- 
duced in their proper persons, and by their proper 
names — he instructed England on its own weakness, 
folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the 
Germans, on the importance of Geist and ideas, &c., &c. 
The author brought himself in by name as a simple 
inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or com- 
passionately looked down upon by everybody ; and by 
this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar 
treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 
1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more 
puzzled, yet more Frusso-7mmic, than ever, he supple- 
mented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it 
were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius 
before Paris, and launched the whole as a book. 

The letters had been much laughed over ; but I do 
not think the book was very widely bought — at any 
rate, its very high price during the time in which it 
was out of print shows that no large number was 
printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether 
so discreditable to the British public as it would have 
been,' had its sole cause been the undoubted but un- 
palatable truths told by the writer. Either, as some 
say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, be- 
cause of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public 
has never resented these much. But, in the first place, 
the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit 



I50 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

but not much humour ; and after a time one feels that 
Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel 
says, " very witty and comedy," but that we should 
not be altogether sorry if they would go. Further, 
the direct personaHties — the worst instances concerned 
Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr 
Sala — struck, and strike, some people as being not 
precisely in good taste. The constant allusions and 
references to minor and ephemeral things and persons 
were not of course then unintelligible, but they were 
even then teasing. In all these points,, if Friendshif s 
Garland be compared, I will once more not say with 
A Tale of a Tub, but even with the History of John 
Bull, its weakness will come out rather strongly. 

But this was not all. It was quite evident — and it 
was no shame and no disadvantage to him — that the 
jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest 
behind, and by means of, his jest 3 that he was no 
mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced 
reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at 
his programme — at his gospel — there is no vestige of 
anything tangible about either. Not very many impar- 
tial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favour- 
ite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in 
state-provided middle-class schools 3 and this w^as speci- 
ally difficult in 187 1, if they remembered how some 
few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the 
state provided middle-class schools of France. While, 
for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 151 

thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had 
played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, 
in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, 
and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able 
for the life of him to discover any way of safety in 
Friendshif s Garland. 

Nor, to take with the Garland for convenience sake 
Irish Essays. 1882, the political book which closed this 
period with the political book that opened it, do we 
find things much better, even long after "the Wilder- 
ness" had been mostly left behind There Is indeed 
less falsetto and less flippancy ; perhaps Mr Arnold 
had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities 
of regular essays in " three-decker " reviews — of a lay 
sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest 
public school in the world — discouraged the playfulness 
which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish 
young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness — 
not xw the Philistine but in the strictly scientific 
sense — is more glaring than ever, and there are 
other faults with it. Great part of An Unregarded 
Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out com- 
parison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that 
of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Qumion 
to David Copperfield. In the first place, one thinks 
wickedly of the gibe in Friendship's Garland about 
*' Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of un- 
sectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickv/ick." In 
the second, one asks on what principles of literary art 



152 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustra- 
tion in passing, can be worked to death and turned in- 
side out and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages. 
And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are 
not in form but in substance. Minor contradictions do 
not matter, though in a copy of the book I have read 
there is a damaging comparison by some annotator 
between Mr Arnold's description of English Govern- 
ment at p. 4 and his rosy picture of education under 
Government at p. 107. This might happen to any- 
body, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this 
censor of the " unideaed " has evidently himself no 
" ideas," no first principles, in politics at all. That, 
play what tricks you will, all possible politics come 
round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of 
the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the con- 
sequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not 
materially by historical and racial characteristics, are 
as constant as anything commonly called scientific, — 
this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all. 
He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray 
died too soon to know very much of him. But I have 
always thought that, for a criticism of life possessing 
prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's wedding con- 
gratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny 
as regards the Matth^an gospel. " Nothing," said the 
Chevalier, when he had established himself as agent to 
the Duke of Garbanzos, " is so important to the welfare 
of the household as Good Sherry T And so we find that 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 53 

the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by the 
substitution of State-governed for private middle-class 
schools, by the saturation of England with "ideas," 
by all our old friends. 

The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh - poohs the 
notion that Ireland, except by force, will never be 
blended with England ; it would be as sensible to 
say this " of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was 
not, I think, dead — he was certainly not dead long 
— w^hen Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of 
course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the 
Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly 
threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. 
He quotes Goethe — a great man of letters, but perhaps 
the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton 
— to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes 
Burke — the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the 
prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had 
touched as it opened his eyes — to tell us what to do 
with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of 
these essays. The Inconipatibles, is again connected with 
David Copperfield. I have said that, from the merely 
literary point of view, the perpetual ringing of the 
changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion — Quinion, 
Murdstone, Creakle — is inartistic and irritating. But 
from the philosophical and political point of view it 
is far worse. No Englishman with any sense of fact 
ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as 
normal types. They are alw^ays fantastic exaggerations, 



154 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality 
as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their 
nearest companions in the art of line. Of the three 
figures selected in particular, Creakle is a caricature ; 
Murdstone, though not exactly that, is a repulsive ex- 
ception ; and Quinion is so mere a cojuparse or 
" super " that to base any generalisation on him is 
absurd. The dislike of the British public to be " talked 
book to " may be healthy or unhealthy j but if it takes 
no great heed of this kind of talking book, small blame 
to it ! The same hopeless, not to say the same wil- 
ful, neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr 
Arnold (to his credit be it said) had no great hopes of 
the Land Bill of 1881. But his own panaceas — a sort 
of Cadi-court for " bag-and-baggaging " bad landlords, 
and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism — ^were, at 
least, no better, and went, if it were possible, even 
more in the teeth of history. 

It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological 
licence for the sake of logical coherence) to say a few 
words on the other pohtical and quasi-political pieces 
reprinted with Irish Essays — the address to Ipswich 
working men, Ecce Convertimur ad Geiites^ the Eton 
speech on Eutrapelia^ and the ambitious Future of 
Liberalism} The first is a curious but not very im- 

^ Of the remaining contents, the P}-efaccs of 1 85 3-5 are invalu- 
able, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed. Of 
The French Play in London, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I 
take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with 
the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of 



IN THE WILDERNESS. I 55 

portant appeal to the lower class to educate the 
middle, with episodic praises of " equality," " acade- 
mies," and the like, as well as glances at a more 
extensive system of " municipalisation," which, not to 
the satisfaction of everybody, has come about since. 
The second contains some admirable remarks on 
classical education, some still moiC admirable protests 
against reading about the classics instead of reading 
the classics, and the famous discourse on Eutrapelia^ 
with its doctrine that "conduct is three-fourths of life," 
its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and its really 
great indications of societies dying of the triumph of 
Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse 
quite admirable in intention, though if " heckling " had 
been in order on that occasion, a sharp youth might 
have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking where 
the canons of " moral adequacy " are written. 

But The Future of LiberalisDi^ which the Elizabethans 
would have called a " cooling-card " after the Liberal 
triumph of 1880, exhibits its author's pohtical quiddity 
most clearly. Much that he says is perfectly true ; 
much of it, whether true or not, is, as Sam Weller 
observes, " wery pretty." But the old mistake recurs 
of playing on a phrase ad nauseam — in this case a 
phrase of Cobbett's (one of the greatest of phrase- 
makers, but also one of the chief of the apostles of 

Hugo ; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the 
middle class. There are good things in it, but they are better 
said elsewhere. The rest needs no notice. 



156 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

unreason) about "the principles of Pratt, the principles 
of Yorke." It was, of course, a capital argumentum 
ad tnvidiaffi, and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it. He 
compared himself to Cobbett — a compliment, no doubt ; 
but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated nothing so 
much as a university man, would not have appreciated. 
Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer's 
"full belly" — at least this is how he himself put it; 
and it would have enforced Mr Arnold's argument and 
antithesis had he known or dared to use it. Mr Arnold 
thought of nothing but the middle classes' empty mind. 
The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord 
Camden and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for 
neither of these things — so " the principles of Pratt, the 
principles of Yorke" comes in as a refrain. To the 
average Briton quotation is no more argument than, 
on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might 
do for ornament, if not for argument, — might help the 
lesson and point it at least. So we turn to the lesson 
itself. This " Liberal of the future," as Mr Arnold 
styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with 
philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They 
cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs." 
Perhaps ; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a 
ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion ? 
There is no voice, neither any that answers. And 
then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but 
temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, 
to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism), our 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 57 

prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought to promote 
"the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't 
promote this. Ah ! what a blessed word is " humanisa- 
tion," the very equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, 
of " Mesopotamia " ! But when for the considerable rest 
of the essay we try to find out what humanisation ?>, 
why we find nothing but the old negative impalpable 
gospel, that we must " ^zVmaterialise our upper class, 
^wvulgarise our middle class, ^zVbrutalise our lower 
class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject ! " "om-m-ject 
and sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of 
Thomas Carlyle's genius discovered and summarised 
Coleridge, and with Coleridge the whole nineteenth 
century. A screed of jargon — a patter of shibboleth — 
and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous 
question — " May you not possibly — indeed most prob- 
ably — in attempting to remove what you choose to 
consider as the defects of these classes, remove also 
what you acknowledge to be their virtues — the govern- 
ing faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral 
health of the middle, the force and vigour of the 
lower?" A momentous question indeed, and one 
which, as some think, has got something of an answer 
since, and no comfortable one ! 

I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may 
appear too polemical in this chapter. But the cir- 
cumstances of the case made it almost as impossible, 
as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely 
recitative and colourless ; and Mr Arnold's own ex- 



158 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

ample gives ample licence. In particular, any one 
who has had actual and close knowledge of the actual 
progress of politics for many years may be pardoned 
for speaking with some decision on the practice of 
sitting at ease in Zion, and raying out curious obser- 
vations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the charac- 
ter of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such 
things in English politics — no doubt for a good many 
years before Mr Arnold's day we had too little of 
them. But too much, though a not unpopular, is a 
very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too 
little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, 
I venture to think that there was too much of them 
by a very great deal 

It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results 
of this period, from the spectacle of Pegasus 

" Stumbling in miry roads of alien art," 

and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable 
vehicles, to the private history of the decade. This, 
though sadly chequered by Mr Arnold's first domestic 
troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was somewhat 
less laborious than the earlier years, and was light- 
ened by ever more of the social and public distrac- 
tions, which no man entirely dislikes, and which — 
to a certain extent and in a certain way — Mr Arnold 
did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation 
and of literary aim by the termination of the pro- 
fessorship coincided, as such things have a habit of 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 159 

doing, with changes in place and circumstance. The 
Chester Square house grew too small for the children, 
and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then 
achieved. A very pleasant letter to his mother, in 
November 1867, tells how he was present at the 
farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for 
America, how they wanted him (vainly) to come to 
the high table and speak, and how Lord Lytton 
finally brought him into his own speech. He adds 
that some one has given him "a magnificent box of 
four hundred Manilla cheroots" (he must surely have 
counted wrong, for they usually make these things 
in two-hundred-and-fifties or five-hundreds), welcome 
to hand on, though he did not smoke himself. In 
another he expresses the evangelical desire to " do 
Mr Swinburne some good." 

But in January 1868 his baby -child Basil died; 
and the intense family affection, which was one of his 
strongest characteristics, suffered of course cruelly, as 
is recorded in a series of touching letters to his sister 
and mother. He fell and hurt himself at Cannon 
Street, too, but was comforted by his sister with a 
leading case about an illiterate man who fell into a 
reservoir through not reading a notice. The Harrow 
house became a reality at Lady Day, and at Mid- 
summer he went to stay at Panshanger, and " heard 
the word 'Philistine' used a hundred times during 
dinner and ' Barbarian ' nearly as often " (it must be 
remembered that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles 



l6o MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

were coming out now). This half-childish delight in 
such matters (like Mr Pendennis's " It's all in the 
papers, and my name too ! ") is one of the most fas- 
cinating things about him, and one of not a few, 
proving that, if there was some affectation, there was 
no dissimulation in his nature. Too many men, I 
fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed 
a lofty disdain. In September he mentions to Mr 
Grant Duff a plan (which one only wishes he had 
carried out, letting all the "Dogma" series go Kar 
ovpov as it deserved) for "a sketch of Greek poetry, 
illustrated by extracts in harmonious prose." This 
would have been one of the few great literary his- 
tories of the world, and so Apollo kept it in his 
own lap. The winter repeated, far more heavily, the 
domestic blow of the spring, and Tom, his eldest 
son, who had always been delicate, died, aged six- 
teen only, at Harrow, where since the removal he 
had been at school. There is something about this 
in the Letters ; but on the great principle of cur(B 
leves, less, as we should expect, than about the baby's 
death. 

In February next year Mr Arnold's double repute, 
as a practical and official "educationist" and as a 
man of letters, brought him the offer of the care of 
Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, 
and grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to at- 
tend Harrow School and board with the Arnolds. 
The charge, though honourable and, I suppose, prof- 



IN THE WILDERNESS. l6l 

itable, might not have been entirely to the taste of 
everybody ; but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link 
with the Continent, and he welcomed it. The same 
year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very interesting 
and by no means unsound criticism on that important 
event in the life of a poet, the issue of the first col- 
lected edition of his poems.^ This was in two volumes, 
and is now rather precious. " It might be fairly 
urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tenny- 
son, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than 
Browning ; yet because I have perhaps more of a 
fusion of the two than either of them, and have 
more regularly applied that fusion to the main line 
of modern development, I am likely enough to have 

^ A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected edi- 
tions may not be unwelcome ; for, as was always the case with him, 
he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised 
as comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's 
Poems and the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen 
pieces — including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius — 
are omitted, though the fine In Utrumqiie Paratiis reappears for the 
first time as a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection 
dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered 
not only Stagirius and others but The New Sirens, besides giving, 
for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard, printed twenty- 
two years before in Eraser. A further reprint in 1881 restored the 
whole Church of Brou and A Dream, and gave two or three small 
additions, especially Geisfs Gj-ave. The three-YohxmQ edition of 
1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added West- 
minster Abbey and Poor Matthias. The ^/z^-volume edition of 1890 
reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead ; it 
is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller 
pieces. 

L 



l62 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

my turn." One can only query whether poetry has 
anything to do with " modern development," and 
desiderate the addition to " sentiment " of " art." 
He seems to imply that Mr Gladstone personally 
prevented his appointment to a commissionership 
under the Endowed Schools Act. But the year 
ended with a complimentary reference from Mr Dis- 
raeli at Latimers about "Sweetness and Light." 

In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa 
(now in the most comfortable lap of all the gods or 
goddesses, with Hodge and Bona Marietta and Hinse 
of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in June 
Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it 
down to "a young and original sort of man, Lord 
Salisbury, being Chancellor " ; and Lord Salisbury him- 
self afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to 
have addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" 
But though he was much pleased by his reception, he 
thought Lord Salisbury " dangerous," as being unlit- 
erary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes. 

In December he had an amusing and (as it ended 
well) not unsatisfactory experience of the ways of In- 
come Tax Commissioners. These gentlemen acted on 
even vaguer principles than those on which they once 
assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident 
received ;£6 *' author's rights " for a week, at ;£3oo 
per annum, on the sound arithmetical argument that 
there are fifty (indeed, there are fifty-two) weeks in a 
year, and that fifty times six is three hundred. They 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 1 63 

put Mr Arnold's literary profits at ;£"iooo, and he 
had to expostulate in person before they would let 
him down to ;£^2oo, though he pathetically explained 
that "he should have to write more articles than he 
ever had done " to prevent his being a loser even at 
that. About the catastrophe of the A?i?ie'e Terrible, his 
craze for " righteousness * makes him a very little 
Pecksniffian — one thinks of the Tower of Siloam. But 
it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871, they are arrang- 
ing for him " a perfect district, Westminster and a 
small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the 
days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on 
buns were over. He is interested about Deutsch (the 
comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles), 
receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for 
his services to Prince Thomas, and is proposed for 
the Middlesex magistracy, but (to one's sorrow) de- 
clines. There is fishing at Chenies {vide an admirable 
essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to 
Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs 
are grown very large and handsome, and experts advise 
their conversion into bacon." But Mrs x\rnold '' does 
not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback of pig- 
keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime ; 
but you can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by 
merely breeding the pigs and selling the litters young. 

After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 
16, 1872, Mr Arnold's second son died at Harrow, 
and again the reception of the blow and its effect are 



I64 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief. Yet one 
phrase, " I cannot write his name without stopping to 
look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is 
equal to volumes. The letters of this year are few, but 
in September begins a correspondence of some interest 
and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanes. Nor 
does 1873 give much except description of a tour to 
Italy, while in May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, 
with its painful memories, to Cobham, which was Mr 
Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In September 
he " shoots worse than ever " {vide Frieiidshifs Gar- 
land^ in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and 
soon after his mother dies. But it is not given to all 
men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty. 
And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it 
gives being rather didactic and controversial, as for 
instance in a letter to his sister, who had apparently 
remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of 
Literature and Dog7tia. A pleasant letter to Miss 
Kingsley on her father's death (1875) puts in good 
evidence against the charge of grudging appreciation 
of contemporaries which has often been brought 
against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded ex- 
pressions, rather injudiciously published in other letters, 
may seem to confirm. 

Another in December contains an instance^ of that dis- 

^ " I do not like the course for the History School at all ; nothing 
but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by 
quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really 



IN THE WILDERNESS. 165 

like to history, which long before its publication careful 
students of his works had always noticed in him. The 
fact is, that to a man of ideas, as Mr Arnold would 
have liked to be called — a man of theories or of 
crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people 
actually did call him — history must bs an annoying 
study The things that ought to happen do not 
happen, and the things that do happen have to be awk- 
wardly explained away or hazardously ignored His 
almost pettish disgust for the historic estimate in litera- 
ture itself may have either caused or been caused by 
this more general dislike, and the dislike itself explains 
the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer 
guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible 
to sympathise with his disapproval of the divorce of 
History and Law, which used to be united in the Oxford 
schools. Together they made a discipline, inferior 
indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school 
of Literce. Humaniores^ the best intellectual training in 
the world. When they are divided, it may be feared 
that law becomes a mere technicality, if not a mere 
bread-study, and that history is at once thin and vague. 
But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis 5 for, 
but a page or two afterwards, this disregard of history 
leads Mr Arnold into a very odd blunder. His French 
friend, M. Fontanes, had thought of writing about 

great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new 
language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exer- 
cises it." 



1 66 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," 
he says, " est interessant, mais il n'est pas une source ; 
des courants actuels qui nous portent, aucun ne vient 
de lui." Godwin is the high priest of Anarchism ; he 
is our first Socialist philosopher; he advocated no 
marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. 
And dans nos courants actuels rie?i ne vient de hit I This 
was early in 1876, and later in the same year we have 
from him the singular judgment that George Sand, just 
dead, was " the greatest spirit in our European world 
from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle 
may be appropriately closed for the time by mentioning 
that in the spring of 1877 Mr Arnold was approached 
with a view to his standing once more for the Poetry 
Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a 
sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, 
and in effect, though doubtless not in intention, he 
had already obeyed it. "A French Critic on Milton," 
published in January 1877, is the first literary article 
of any importance that his bibliography records for the 
whole decade which we have surveyed in this chapter. 

Note. — It is particularly unlucky that the P7-ose Passages, which 
the author selected from his works and published in 1889, did not 
appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that less than one-fourth 
of their contents is devoted to literature, all the rest to the " Dead 
Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about the book in the text. 
It is, however, a useful though incomplete and one-sided chresto- 
mathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of view, illustrat- 
ing both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious ordoitnattce 
of his paragraphs in building up thought and view. 



i6y 



CHAPTER V. 



THE LAST DECADE. 



It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical 
to assume, that in the change or reversion noted at the 
end of the last chapter, Mr Arnold had any conscious- 
ness of rehnquishment, still more to hint any definite 
sense of failure on his part. He would probably have 
said (if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, 
and he had condescended to reply) that he had said 
his say, had shot his bolt, and might leave them to 
produce their effect. But that there was, if no re- 
pentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe. He 
must have seen — he almost acknowledges that he 
saw — that the work which he at least thought was 
conservative was being utilised by others in a purely 
destructive spirit ; he must have found himself in very 
unwelcome alliances ; and (which is worst of all to a 
delicate and sensitive spirit) he must constantly have 
found fools dotting his /'s and emphasising his innuen- 
does in their own clumsy and Philistine fashion. At 
any rate, it is purely historical to say that he did 



l68 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

henceforward almost entirely change his main line of 
operation as to religious matters, and that though, as 
has been shown, he persisted, not too fortunately, in 
politics, his method of discussion in that likewise was 
altered. As we heard no more of the three Lord 
Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society 
were permitted to remain unchronicled. In the latter 
department seriousness came upon Mr Arnold; in the 
former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly most 
welcome silence. 

Most welcome : for he was voiceful enough on other 
and his proper subjects. "Falkland," which followed 
"A French Critic on Milton," in March in the Fortnightly^ 
and " George Sand," which followed it, as has been said, 
in June in the Nineteenth Century^ somewhat deserved 
the title {Mixed Essays) of the volume in which they 
were two years later reprinted. But the last essay of 
the year 1877, that on Mr Stopford Brooke's Primer^ 
was, like the " French Critic," and even more than that, 
pure literature. *'A French Critic on Goethe," which 
appeared in the Quarte?'ly Review for January 1878, 
followed next. The other pieces of this year, which 
also, with one exception, appeared in Mixed Essays, 
were, with that exception, evidences of a slight but venial 
relapse, or let us say of convalescence not yet quite 
turned into health. " Equality " (Fort7iightly, March 
1878), "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" {Fort- 
nightly, July 1878), and " Porro Unum est Necessarium " 
{Fortnightly, November 1878), were, if not of "the 



THE LAST DECADE. 169 

Utmost last provincial band," yet not of the pure 
Quirites, the genuine citizens of the sacred city of 
Mr Arnold's thought : and he seceded from this latter 
in not a few of those estimable but unimportant Irish 
essays which have been noticed in the last chapter. 

But the literary contents of Mixed Essays are very 
interesting, and the Johnson paper (really a preface 
to the six selected lives, which he edited for Messrs 
Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent piece of work. 
His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite unerring. 
For he ought surely to have given the " Cowley," with its 
(from his own point of view) invaluable /^'z';;/ ^«? ^^/^/-^ 
in the estimate of the " metaphysicals." And he might 
have missed the " Swift," which, though extremely inter- 
esting as a personal study from its mixture of prejudice 
and constraint, its willingness to wound, and yet — not 
its fear but — its honest compunction at striking, is, for 
the purpose of the volume, misplaced. But he had a 
right to give what he chose : and his preface has 
points of the very highest value. The opening passage 
about the point de repere itself, the fixed halting-place 
to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh 
calculations, is one of the great critical loci of the 
world, and especially involves the main contribution 
of the nineteenth century to criticism if not to litera- 
ture altogether. We may exalt, without very much 
doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the century 
of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, 
of Heine and Hugo. But we have seen such strange 



I70 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

revolutions in this respect that it may not do to be 
too confident. The glory of which no man can de- 
prive our poor dying siecle is that not one, of all the 
others since history began, has taken such pains to under- 
stand those before it, has, in other words, so discovered 
and so utilised the value of points de repere. It 
may be that this value is, except in the rarest cases, 
all that a critic can ever pretend to — that he may be 
happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the 
formulation of the idea (for he did much more than 
merely borrow it from the French) Mr Arnold showed 
his genius, his faculty of putting 

"What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." 

And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criti- 
cism or in creation, he has his reward — a reward that 
no man can take awa}^, even if any one were disposed 
to try. 

As a whole. Mixed Essays itself, which followed Last 
Essays on Church and Religion at an interval of two 
years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its 
predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to 
excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the 
graces. " Mixed " is perhaps not a strictly accurate 
title, for the volume consists of two halves, the contents 
of each of which are homogenous enough, but which have 
next to nothing to do with each other. But even in 
the non-literary essays we are out of "The Wilderness" 
in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has 



1 



THE LAST DECADE. 171 

just been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while 
"Equality" was also delivered as a lecture during the 
years 1877 and 1878. The exception was the paper 
called " Democracy," which he reprinted from his first 
work on Foreign Schools in 186 1, where it had appeared 
as an Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means 
uninteresting or uninstructive, though perhaps it is not 
entirely favourable to the idea of Mr Arnold's develop- 
ment as a zoon politicon. It has been said before that 
his earliest political writing is a good deal less fantastic 
and more sane than that of his middle period, and though 
"the last of life for which the first was made" was now 
restoring to him much of his power in this direction, 
yet he was always much joined to idols in matters polit- 
ical. In grasp " Democracy " does not quite come up to 
its rather ambitious title ; and a moment's thought will 
show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic 
subject. All projects for further Parliamentary Reform 
had failed utterly in England; and nobody dreamt of 
what the next five or six years would bring. In France 
there was what looked like a crushing mihtary despotism : 
in other Continental countries the repression which had 
followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being 
relaxed, or not relaxed at all. American democracy 
had not had its second baptism of Civil War. The 
favourite fancies about the respective ethos of aris- 
tocracy, of the middle - class, and of the lower do 
indeed appear, but for the most part Mr Arnold 
confines himself to the simple question of State in- 



172 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

terference, for which in his own subject of education 
he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have 
seen extended. It has been more than once remarked 
already that he may justly be regarded as a politician 
of more seriousness than he has here been repre- 
sented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the 
things which actually happen is taken as the criterion. 
For State interference has grown and is growing every 
day. But then it may be held — and as a matter of 
principle he would not himself have contested it — 
that a man's politics should be directed, not by what 
he thinks will happen, but by what he thinks ought 
to happen. And some of us, while not in love by 
any means with the middle -class Liberal ideas of 
1 830- 1 860, think that the saving grace of that day 
that is dead was precisely its objection to State 
interference. 

"Equality," which follows, and which starts what 
might be called at the time of the book its contempor- 
ary interest, is much more far-reaching and of greater 
curiosity; indeed, it may perhaps be held to be the 
most curious, in a certain sense, of all its author's writ- 
ings, and to give, in a not fully satisfactory but sug- 
gestive fashion, a key to his complex character which 
is supplied by no other of his essays. That there was 
(in no silly or derogatory sense of an often absurdly 
used word) a slightly un-English side to that character, 
few acute judges would deny. But its results, in the 
greater part of the works, are so diffused, and, as it 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 73 

were, subterranean, that they are difficult to extract and 
concentrate. Here we seem to get the spirit much nearer 
proof. For the Equality which Mr Arnold here cham- 
pions is not English but French equality ; not political 
and judicial equality before the law, but social equality 
enforced by the law. He himself admits, and perhaps 
even a little exaggerates, his attitude of Atha7iasius 
co7itra imaidum in this respect, amassing with relish 
expressions, in the sense opposite to his own, from 
such representative and yet essentially diverse author- 
ities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine 
May, Mr Froude, and Mr Lowe. Against them he 
arrays Menander and George Sand — a counter- 
championship not itself suggestive of Equality. This 
may be " only his fun " — a famous utterance which it 
is never more necessary to keep in mind than when 
speaking or writing of Mr Arnold, for his fun, such as 
it was, was pervading, and occasionally rather cryptic. 
But the bulk of the paper is perfectly serious. Social 
equality, and its compulsory establishment by a law 
against free bequest or by pubhc opinion, these are 
his themes. He asserts that the Continent is in 
favour of them ; that the English colonies, ci-devaiif 
and actual, are in favour of them ; that the Greeks 
were in favour of them ; that the Bible is in favour 
of them. He cites Mr Hamerton as to the virtues 
of the French peasant. He renews his old tilt at the 
manners of the English lower-middle class, at Messrs 
Moody and Sankey, at the great " Jingo " song of twenty 



1/4 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

years ago (as to which, by the way, a modern Fletcher 
of Saltoun might have something to say to-day), at the 
Puritans, at Mr Goldwin Smith, at many things and 
many persons. 

I feel that history has given me at the moment 
rather an unfair advantage over Mr Arnold here. One 
could always pick plenty of holes in " Equality," could 
suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very good 
thing of it with their equality (which included slavery) ; 
that the Biblical point is far from past argument ; that 
M. Zola, for instance, supplies an interesting commen- 
tary on Mr Hamerton's rose-coloured pictures of the 
French peasantry ; that whatever Mr Arnold's own lot 
may have been, others who have lived in small French 
towns with the cojiunis voyageur have not found his 
manners so greatly superior to those of the English 
bagman. But just at this moment, and, in fact, in an 
increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold wrote, the 
glorification of France has become difficult or im- 
possible. Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him 
in vain about the political effect of French Equahty 
even at that time : but one need not confine oneself to 
politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France 
has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by 
compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and 
more. Perhaps equaUty has nothing to do with the 
decadence of her literature, with that state of morals 
which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan 
emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up 



THE LAST DECADE. 175 

as an awful example, fit to warn England to flee to the 
refuge of his own undogmatic Nephelococcygia^ with the 
ineffable scandals of Panama and the Dreyfus case, with 
the mixture of blind illucidity and febrile passion which 
characterises the French press. Only, what is left? 
Where are the improvements due to this great influence ? 
They are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable 
dignity of the French peasant and the polished refine- 
ment of the French middle-class. Frankly, one may 
prefer Hodge and Bottles. 

" Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism " has less 
actuality, and, moreover, it belongs to a group of which 
enough has been said in reference to the Irish Essays. 
But " Porro Unum est Necessarium " possesses not merely 
an accidental but a real claim to fresh attention, not 
merely at the moment when there is at last some 
chance of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interfer- 
ence of the State in English secondary education, being 
realised, but because it is one of the expressions of that 
dream which was in his life so important. It consists 
partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact 
that, in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's levee en 
masse against the Tory Government of 1874-80, the 
Liberal programme contained nothing about this darling 
object. And the superiority of France is trotted out 
again ; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet 
at last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for 
pretty much the substance of present Secondary Educa- 
tion Reform schemes — fimited inspection, qualification 



176 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of masters, leaving certificates, &c. " It do not over- 
stimulate," to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was 
shortly to devote much attention ; but we leave the 
political or semi-political batch in considerably greater 
charity with the author than his prose volumes for years 
past had rendered possible. 

No reserves, no allowances of the least importance 
are necessary in dealing with the rest of the volume. I 
do not think it fanciful to discern a sort of involuntary 
or rather unconscious "Ouf!" of relief in the first, the 
" Guide to English Literature," on the subject, as has 
been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke's always excellent and 
then novel Primer. A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid 
at starting : we are told sternly that we must not laugh 
(as it is to be feared too many of us did and do) at the 
famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the boys 
in France learning the same lesson at the same hour. 
For this was the result of State interference : and all 
the works of State interference are blessing and blessed. 
But, this due rite paid, Mr Arnold gives himself up to 
enjoyment, laudation, and a few good-natured and, for 
the most part, extremely judicious proposals for making 
the good better still. Even if this last characteristic 
were not present, it would be unjust to call the article a 
puff. Besides, are puffs so wholly bad ? A man may 
be not very fond of sweets, and yet think a good puff 
now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot 
from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be 
a very pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's 



THE LAST DECADE. 1/7 

review is much more than a puff. Once, indeed, there 
is even a hypercriticism, due to that sHght want of 
familiarity with literary history proper which has been 
noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with 
Mr Brooke for adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, 
"from the Restoration to George III." He objects to 
this that "George III. has nothing to do with litera- 
ture," and suggests *' to the Death of Pope and Swift." 
This is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics 
have often repeated. Perhaps George III. had nothing 
to do with literature ; but his accession immediately 
preceded, and may even, as the beginning of a pure 
English regi?ne, have done something to produce, numer- 
ous appearances of the Romantic revival — Percy's Re- 
Hques, Kurd's Essays, Macpherson's Ossian, The Castle 
of Otranto, and others. The deaths of Pope and Swift 
have no such synchronism. They mark, indeed, the dis- 
appearance of the strongest men of the old school, but 
not the appearance of even the weakest and most in- 
fantine of the new. Still this, though interesting in itself, 
is a trifle, and the whole paper, short as it is, is a sort 
of Nunc Di?nitHs in a new sense, a hymn of praise for 
dismissal, not from but to work — to the singer's proper 
function, from which he has been long divorced. 

" Falkland," which follows, is less purely literary, but 
yet closely connected with literature. One thinks with 
some ruth of its original text, which was a discourse on 
Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary, the late Lord 
Carnarvon — the most curious and pathetic instance of 

M 



178 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who 
was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as 
in weaknesses and disabihties of temperament, during 
the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been 
indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, 
writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, 
and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters y but 
I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. 
His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of 
Sweetness and Light, of lucidity of mind and large- 
ness of temper, was most natural, and its sources most 
obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, 
to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at 
any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by 
a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting be- 
tween two stools, and by that — it may be lovable, it 
may be even estimable — incapacity to think, to speak, 
to behave like a man of this world, which besets the 
conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the 
contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so con- 
genial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us. 
He could not .have had a better subject , nor can 
Falkland ever hope for a vates better consecrated, by 
taste, temper, and ability to sing his praises. 

Then we are back again in pure literature, with the 
two notable Quarterly articles, already glanced at, on M. 
Scherer as " A French Critic on Milton " and " A French 
Critic on Goethe." There was a very strong sympathy, 
creditable to both, between the two. M. Scherer went 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 79 

further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his 
views on religion ; but they agreed as to dogma. His 
literary criticism was somewhat harder and drier than 
Mr Arnold's ; but the t\vo agreed in acuteness, lucidity, 
and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of the com- 
parative method. Both were absolutely at one in their 
uncompromising exaltation of " conduct." So that Mr 
Arnold was writing quite con afnore when he took up 
his pen to recommend M. Scherer to the British public, 
which mostly knew him not at that time. 

But he did not begin directly with his main subject. 
He had always, as we have seen, had a particular 
grudge at Macaulay, who indeed represented in many 
ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to 
oppose. Now just at this time certain younger critics, 
while by no means championing Macaulay generally, 
had raised pretty loud and repeated protests against 
Mr Arnold's exaggerated depreciation of the Lays as 
" pinchbeck " ; and I am rather disposed to think that 
he took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank. 
He fastens on one of Macaulay's weakest points, a point 
the weakness of which was admitted by Macaulay him- 
self — the " gaudily and ungracefully ornamented " (as its 
author calls it) Essay on Milton. And he points out, 
with truth enough, that its " gaudy and ungraceful 
ornament " is by no means its only fault — that it is bad 
as criticism, that it shows no clear grasp of Milton's 
real merits, that it ignores his faults, that it attributes 
to him qualities which were the very reverse of his 



l80 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

real qualities. He next deals slighter but still telling 
blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only 
negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not 
positively conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like 
Macaulay, and then with a turn, itself excellently 
rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M. Scherer's 
own dealings with the subject. Thenceforward he 
rather effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and sum- 
marises the " French Critic's " deliverances, laying 
special stress on the encomiums given to Milton's style. 
The piece is one of his most artfully constructed ; and 
I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious 
and attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call 
it, to a new society. 

The method is not very different in "A French Critic on 
Goethe," though Carlyle, the English "awful example" 
selected for contrast, is less maltreated than Macaulay, 
and shares the disadvantageous part with Lewes, and 
with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay, 
good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other ; 
perhaps because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his 
author, and even seems to be in two minds about that 
author's subject — about Goethe himself. Earlier, as 
we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse, 
spoken with praise — for him altogether extraordinary, if 
not positively extravagant — of Goethe ; he now seems a 
little doubtful, and asks rather wistfully for "the just 
judgment of forty years," the calm revised estimate of 
the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in 



THE LAST DECADE. l8l 

parts lower than he can bring himself to admit ; and 
this turns the final passages of the essay into a rather 
unsatisfactory chain of *' I agree with this," " I do not 
agree with that." But the paper retains the great merit 
which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece 
of ushering ; and that, we must remember, was what it 
was designed to be. 

In " George Sand," which completes the volume, 
we have Mr Arnold no longer as harbinger of another, 
but in the character, in which after all he is most wel- 
come, of speaker on his own account. His estimate 
of this prolific amuseuse will probably in the long-run 
seem excessive to the majority of catholic and com- 
parative critics ; nor is it at all difficult to account for 
the excess. Mr Arnold belonged exactly to the gener- 
ation to which in England, even more than in France, 
George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic ex- 
ponent of personal sorrows. Even the works of her 
" storm-and-stress " period were not too far behind 
them ; and her later calmer productions seem to have 
had, at least for some natures among the " discouraged 
generation of 1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr 
Arnold himself by his first publications belonged), 
something of that healing power which he has assigned, 
in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. 
A man is never to be blamed for a certain generous 
overvaluation of those who have thus succoured him ; it 
would be as just to blame him for thinking his mother 
more beautiful, his father wiser than they actually were. 



1 82 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of 
charm. The personal and biographical part is done 
with admirable taste, not a grain too much or too little 
of that moi so hats sable in excess, so piquant as a 
mere seasoning, being introduced : and the panegyric 
is skilful in the extreme. To be sure, Mr Hamerton 
reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight 
because the French peasant no longer takes off his 
hat. Alas ! there is no need to go to the country of 
La Ter?'e to discover this sign of moral elevation. But 
the delusion itself is only another proof of Mr Arnold's 
constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the 
whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barr- 
ing the first Essays in Criticism itself, he had written 
no better book. 

Before very long the skill in selecting and editing 
which had been first applied to Johnson's Lives found 
extended opportunities. Mr Arnold had much earlier, 
in the Essays in Criticism^ expressed a wish that the 
practice of introducing books by a critical and bio- 
graphical Essay, which had long been naturalised in 
France, and had in former times not been unknown 
in England, should be revived among us. His words 
had been heard even before he himself took up the 
practice, and for about the usual time — your thirty 
years is as a matter of fact your generation — it flour- 
ished and prospered, not let us hope to the great detri- 
ment of readers, and certainly to the modest advan- 
tage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 83 

Nor can it exactly be said to have ceased — though for 
some years grumbles have been uttered. "Why," says 
one haughty critic, — "why mar a beautiful edition of 
So-and-so's works by incorporating with them this or 
that man's estimate of their value ? " " The publishers," 
says an inspired communique^ ' ■ are beginning to recognise 
that the public has no need of such things in the case of 
works of established repute, of which there is nothing 
new to be said." No doubt both these are genuine 
utterances : no doubt the haughty critic would have 
steadily refused to " mar " the book by his estimate if 
he had been asked to do so \ no doubt the particular 
firm of publishers were not m the least influenced by a 
desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred 
guineas which this or that man might have demanded 
for saying nothing new. 

But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. 
He thought — and not a few good wits have thought 
with him — not only that these Introductions are an 
opportunity for men like himself, with original gifts of 
thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the 
mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that 
has been thought and said about everybody, might 
find something new to it even m the observations of 
lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course, and neither 
to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utiHty of such Intro- 
ductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. 
Not one in a thousand of the probable readers of any 
book has all the information which even a fairly 



l84 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

competent introducer will put before him; not one in 
a hundred knows the previous opinions of the author; 
not many possess that acquaintance with his whole 
work which it is part of the business of the introducer 
to acquire, and adjust for the better understanding 
of the particular book. Of course, if an Introduc- 
tion is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought 
and reading — if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so 
forth — it had better not be there. But this is only 
saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which 
does not get us much beyond the intellectual edifi- 
cation of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the intro- 
ducer is a boggier, the Introduction will probably do 
good to those who want it and can be neglected by 
those who don't ; while in the rarer and better cases 
it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that 
very value as a poi7it de repere which Mr Arnold had dis- 
cussed. It will be good relatively and good in itself, 
— a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge 
and to the literature of power. 

Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted 
to neglect his " intromittings " with Isaiah, for reasons 
already sufficiently given. In more hopeful matter 
there are three examples which are not soon likely 
to lose interest or value : the selection of his own 
poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. 
To the first the English habits of his own day did 
not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, 
and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry 



THE LAST DECADE. 185 

for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Cole- 
ridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and 
while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which 
Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous 
divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface 
enables those who have some slight power of expan- 
sion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view 
of purpose ; and the selection itself is quite excellent. 
Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good 
knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to 
subjoin, are the beautiful Resig7iation^ which Mr 
Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the 
appendix to his English Poets ; and the curious, char- 
acteristic, and not much short of admirable Dream, 
which in the earlier issues formed part of Switzer- 
land, and should never have been excluded from it. 
It is probably the best selection by a poet from his 
own works that has ever been issued, and this is 
saying not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold 
less for his saying, reported either by Mr Ward or 
Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have given all 
the poems. 
"^ As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they 
gain enormously by " this man's estimate of them," 
and do not lose by " this man's " selection. I have 
had occasion, not once or twice only, and for pur- 
poses not invariably the same, to go through the 
Wordsworth book carefully, side by side with the 
complete poems, in order to see whether anything 



1 86 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

has necessarily to be added, I really do not know 
what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the 
deserts of the Excursio7i^ the Prelude^ and the then 
not published Recluse, Wordsworth's real titles are 
put in once for all ; the things by which he must 
stand or fall are there. The professor, the very 
thorough - going student, the literary historian, must 
go farther ; the idle person with a love of literature 
will ; but nobody need. 

And the Introduction (for after all we can all make 
our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) 
is still more precious. I know few critical essays 
which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading 
than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as 
a whole ; but he is in the mere " Petty s " of criticism 
(it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges 
a critical essay by his own agreement with it. Mr 
Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English poet, 
far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a 
poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley -, if it were 
possible in these competitions to allow weight for age, 
he is not as great a poet as Keats ; I am sure he is not 
a greater poet than Tennyson -, I cannot give him rank 
above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be some- 
times naughty and the second frequently silly or rhe- 
torical ; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Moliere 
in, I confess I am lost When and where did Moliere 
write poetry? But these things do not matter ^ they 
are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 87 

it be believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. 
We may include with them the disparaging passage on 
Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold knew little, and 
whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known 
more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" 
and all the rest of it. These are the colours of the 
regiment, the blazonry of the knight ; we take them 
with it and him, and having once said our say against 
them, pass them as admitted. 

But what is really precious is first the excellent 
criticism scattered broadcast all over the essay, and 
secondly, the onslaught on the Wordsworthians. They 
might perhaps retort with a /// quoque. When Mr 
Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Words- 
worth's poetry is precious because its philosophy 
is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its 
" all depends on the subject," and chuckle a little, a 
very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philo- 
sophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical 
treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursio7i 
and The Prelude are, as v/holes, not good poems at all. 
They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. 
But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, 
Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury - process which 
would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and 
allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cata- 
ract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricano ! 

The Byron paper contains more disputable statements 
— indeed the passage about Shelley, if it were quite 



1 88 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

serious, which may be doubted, would almost disqualify 
Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is hardly less 
interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the first 
place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able 
to admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere 
Byronite, indeed, Mr Arnold has even less than he has 
of a Wordsworthian pure and simple. He makes the 
most damaging admissions ; he has to fall back on 
Goethe for comfort and confirmation ; he is greatly dis- 
turbed by M. Scherer's rough treatment of his subject. 
In no essay, I think, does he quote so much from 
others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a 
backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a 
somebody (for instance Professor Nichol) to correct and 
gloss and digress upon while complimenting him. Mr 
Arnold is obviously not at ease in this Zion— which 
indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasi- 
ness gives to the Essay a glancing variety, a sort of ani- 
mation and excitement, which are not common things 
in critical prelections. Nor, though one may think that 
Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not even half 
as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does 
the former appear to be in even the slightest degree 
insincere. Much as there must have been in Byron's 
loose art, his voluble inadequacy — nay, even in his 
choice of subject — that was repellent to Mr Arnold : 
much more as there must have been in his unchastened 
conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, 
morality, teitue of every kind, — yet there were real links 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 89 

between them. Mr Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not 
an altogether admirable or trustworthy ally, against the 
Philistine. He saw in him a link with general European 
literature, a check and antidote to the merely insular. 
Byron's undoubtedly " sincere and strong " dislike of the 
extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful 
to Mr Arnold. Indeed, in his own earlier poems there 
are not wanting Byronic touches and echoes, not so 
easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see and 
hear " confusedly." Lastly, he had, by that sort of 
reaction which often exhibits itself in men of the study, 
an obvious admiration for Force — the admiration which 
makes him in his letters praise France up to 1870 
and Germany after that date — and he thought he saw 
Force in Byron. So that the Essay is written with a 
stimulating mingle-mangle of attraction and reluctance, 
of advocacy and admission. It is very far indeed from 
being one of his best critically. You may, on his own 
principles, " catch him out " in it a score of times. But 
it is a good piece of special pleading, an excellent piece 
of writing, and one of the very best and most consum- 
mate literary causeries in English. 

In strict chronological order, a third example of 
these most interesting and stimulating Prefaces should 
have been mentioned between the " Wordsworth " and 
the *' Byron " — the latter of which, indeed, contains a 
reference to it. This is the famous Introduction to 
Mr T. H. Ward's English Poets, which, in that work 
and in the second series of Essays in Criticism^ where 



190 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

it subsequently appeared, has perhaps had more readers 
than any other of its author's critical papers. It con- 
tains, moreover, that still more famous definition of 
poetry as " a criticism of life " which has been so 
often attacked and has sometimes been defended. I 
own to having been, both at the time and since, one 
of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor 
do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished 
the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen 
since his death, that its critics " mistake an epigram 
for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the 
epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent ; and in 
the second place, an epigram would in the particular 
place have been anything but appropriate, while a 
philosophical definition is exactly what was wanted. 

Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such de- 
fence. He pleaded, with literal justice, that the 
phrase " a criticism of life " was only part of his 
formula, which adds, " under the conditions fixed 
for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and 
poetic beauty." But this does not make the matter 
much better, while it shows beyond controversy that 
it was a philosophical definition that he was attempt- 
ing. It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us 
that poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs 
archidiaconal functions. And while it is not more 
illuminative than that famous and useful jest, it has 
the drawback of being positively delusive, which the 
jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new 



THE LAST DECADE. I9I 

meaning to " criticism " — and the assignment of new 
meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst 
of all explanatory improprieties — poetry is not a criti- 
cism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of 
life — that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at 
the unachievable, — a criticism it cannot be. Prose 
fiction may be and should be such ; drama may be 
and should be such ; but not poetry. And it is espe- 
cially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to 
the term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked 
least Dryden and Pope have much good and true 
criticism of life : The Vanity of Human Wishes is mag- 
nificent criticism of life ; but Mr Arnold has told us 
that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but "classics 
of our prose " That there is criticism of life in poetry 
is true, but then in poetry there is everything. 

It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes 
in the paper. The depreciation of the "historic esti- 
mate," instead of a simple hint to correct it by the 
intrinsic, is certainly one. Another is a distinct ar- 
bitrariness in the commendation or discommendation 
of the examples selected. No one in his senses 
would put the Chanson de Roland on a level with 
the Iliad as a whole ; but some among those people 
who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with 
Greek and Old French will demur to Mr Arnold's 
assignment of an ineffably superior poetical quality to 
one of the two passages he quotes over the other. So 
yet again with the denial of " high seriousness " to 



192 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

Chaucer. One feels disposed to enter and argue out 
a whole handful of not quite contradictory pleas, such 
as *' He has high seriousness " {vide the " Temple of 
Mars," the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, and 
many other places): " Why should he have high serious- 
ness ? " (a most effective demurrer) ; and " What is high 
seriousness, except a fond thing vainly invented for the 
nonce ? " 

But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to 
Mr Arnold, these things do not matter. He must have 
his catchwords : and so " criticism of life " and " high 
seriousness " are introduced at their and his peril. He 
must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so 
he exposes what I fear may be called no very extensive 
or accurate acquaintance with Old French. He must 
impress on us that conduct is three - fourths of life, 
and so he makes what even those who stop short of 
latreia in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about 
that poet likewise. But all the spirit, all the tendency, 
o{ the Introduction is what it ought to be, and the plea 
for the " real " estimate is as wholly right in principle 
as it is partly wrong in application. 

It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on 
Gray and Keats which Mr Arnold contributed to the 
same work. In the former, and here perhaps only, do 
we find him putting his shoulder to the work of critical 
advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. 
With Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on 
points more or fewer at grave difference; though he 



THE LAST DECADE. 1 93 

affected to regard Goethe as a ??iag?tus Apollo of criti- 
cism and creation both, I think in his heart of hearts 
there must have been some misgivings ; and it is im- 
possible that he should not have known his fancy for 
people like the Guerins to be mere engouement. Gray's 
case was different. The resemblances between subject 
and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an 
industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray 
of the nineteenth century ; Gray an indolent, recluse, 
more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth. Again, 
the literary quality of the bard of the Elegy was ex- 
actly of the kind which stimulates critics most. 
From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly 
or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers 
who are a little problematical, who approach the second 
class, above the unquestioned masters. And there was 
the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs. Gray, 
though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the 
vulgar rather than the critics, and he had the singular 
fate of being dispraised both by Johnson and by Words- 
worth. But in this paper of Mr Arnold's the wheel 
came full circle. Everything that can possibly be said 
for Gray — more than some of us would by any means 
indorse — is here said for him : here he has provided 
an everlasting critical harbour, into which he may re- 
treat w^hensoever the popular or the critical breeze 
turns adverse. 

And the Keats, less disputable in its general esti- 
mate, is equally good in itself, and specially interest- 

N 



194 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

ing as a capital example of Mr Arnold's polemic — the 
capital example, indeed, if we except the not wholly 
dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's Life. 
He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of 
Keats which he quotes ; but that was his way, and 
it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical reailade, with 
the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the 
poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them. 
The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with 
the fantasticalities of the Frleiidshif s Garland period, is 
simply enormous. And the praise which follows is 
praise really in the grand style — praise, the style and 
quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart 
from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from 
their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shock- 
ingly misused in these latter days, the word Apprecia- 
tion. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold 
evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars 
here; all is purely critical, purely literary. And yet 
higher praise has never been given by any save the 
mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster 
criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhada- 
manthus. Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the 
most perfect example of Mr Arnold's critical power, 
and it is so late that it shows that power to have 
been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like 
sound old wine, certain to improve for years to come. 
In the seven years that were left to him after the 
publication of the Byron, Mr Arnold did not entirely 



THE LAST DECADE. 195 

c«3rjfine himself to the service of his only true mistress 
Literature. But he never fell again so completely into 
the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 
1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of 
politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a 
less gay and frivolous character than those of a gener- 
ally similar kind in earlier dates. They were partly 
devoted to the change which has brought it about, 
that, while during the third quarter of the century the 
Conservatives were in power, though on three different 
occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, 
in the fourth Mr Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 
to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domi- 
nation. But although he dealt with the phenomenon 
from various points of view in such articles as " The 
Nadir of Liberalism," the " Zenith of Conservatism," 
and so forth, it was chiefly, as was natural at the time, 
in relation to Ireland that he exercised his political pen, 
and enough has been said about these Irish articles by 
anticipation above. Discourses in America^ the result 
of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and 
the articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley's Life, which 
represent his very last stage of life, require more par- 
ticular attention. 

The Discourses in America^ two of them specially 
written, and the other, originally a Cambridge " Rede " 
discourse, recast for the Western Hemisphere, must 
always rank with the most curious and interesting of 
Mr Arnold's works : but the very circum.stances of their 



196 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

composition and delivery made it improbable, if not 
impossible, that they should form one of his best. 
These circumstances were of a kind which reproduces 
itself frequently in the careers of all men of any public 
distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or 
in some position of " greater freedom and less responsi- 
bihty," even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals 
faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that 
person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine. Afterwards he 
is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into 
a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, 
which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in 
the humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more 
or less graceful and ingenious palinode in the more 
honourable one which we allow to the Greek equivalent 
and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in 
grace or in ingenuity ; but he certainly had, in his 
earlier work, allowed it to be perfectly visible that the 
world of American politics, American manners, Ameri- 
can institutions and ways generally, was not in his eyes 
by any means a world all of sweetness or all of light. 

His sense of the ludicroifs, and his sense of art, alike 
precluded even the idea of a clumsy apology, and 
though, as was to be expected, the folk of the baser 
sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased 
with his Discourses, the people of the United States 
generally did not owe him or show him any grudge for 
being frank and consistent as well as polite. The 
subjects were selected and grouped with great skill. 



THE LAST DECADE. I97 

** Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democ- 
racy, which must ever be uppermost — or as nethermost 
not less important — in a republic ; and dealt with it 
after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that 
combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold 
had always affected. " Literature and Science," the 
middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as 
the nationaUty of his audience was concerned, had 
nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was sing- 
ularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and 
which is likely to retain its actuality and its moment 
for many a day and year, perhaps many a century. 
*' Emerson," the last, descended from generalities to the 
consideration of a particular subject, at once specially 
American and specially literary. It would have been 
hard indeed to exhibit better composition in the group- 
ing of the subjects as regards their classes, and criticism 
may be defied to find better examples of each class than 
those actually taken. 

It is not clear that quite such high praise can be 
given to the execution, and the reason is plain : it was 
in the execution, not in the composition and scheme, 
that the hard practical difficulties of the task came in. 
Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as he 
was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restrairut, 
Mr Arnold was both too much of an Englishman and 
too much of a genius not to be ill to ride with the curb. 
And, save perhaps in " Literature and Science " (which 
was not at first written for an American audience at all), 



198 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the pressure of the curb — I had almost said of the twitch 
— is too often evident, or at least suggested. This 
especially applies to the first, the longest, the most 
ambitious, and, as its author would say, most "nobly 
serious" of the three. There are quite admirable 
things in " Numbers " ; and the descant on the worship 
of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, 
is not only nobly serious from the point of view of 
morality, but is one of Mr Arnold's best claims to the 
title of a political philosopher, and even of a political 
prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage 
appears to be either specially in place or well composed 
with its companions. Perhaps the same is true of the 
earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and 
Plato. As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that 
of Mr Arnold's hearers, the larger number did not care 
to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, 
while some at least of the rest did not care to have him 
spoken about at all. Of the philosopher, it is equally 
safe to say that the great majority knew very little, and 
that of the small minority, some must have had 
obstinate questionings connected with the appearance 
of Plato as an authority on the moral health of nations, 
and wuth the application of Mr Arnold's own very true 
and very noble doctrine about Aselgeia. In fact, although 
the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in 
part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold's 
political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of 
them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism. 



THE LAST DECADE. I99 

The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are 
much better as wholes. The opening of the " Emerson," 
with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which 
Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded 
him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to 
recognise very much more than meets the ear — an 
explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on some- 
thing like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, 
which accounts for still more in the careers of his con- 
temporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less 
happy on Carlyle — he never was very happy on Carlyle, 
and for obvious reasons — but here he jars less than 
usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked 
Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found 
that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. 
It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold ; 
yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself. On 
Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own principles 
he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. 
Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all ; but it has 
"once in a hundred years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, 
the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic 
meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is bound 
to say that his denying the title of "great writer" to 
Carlyle is merely absurd — is one of those caprices which 
somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art — he 
is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But 
after justifying his policy of not " cracking up " by still 
further denying his subject the title of a great philo- 



200 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

sophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him 
at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live 
in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault 
to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely 
personal one. To some Gautier, with his doctrine of 

** Sculpte, lime, cisele," 

as the great commandment of the creative artist, has 
been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit : to 
Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. 
To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guerin, with his second- 
hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of 
the spirit ; others scarcely find him so. " This is this 
to thee and that to me." 

The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately 
requires no allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks. 
" Literature and Science " is an apology for a liberal 
education, and for a rationally ordered hierarchy of 
human study, which it would be almost impossible to 
improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think 
that it can ever grow obsolete. Not only was Mr 
Arnold here on his own ground, but he was fighting 
for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and 
shield that he had proved. And the result is like 
that of the fortunate fights of romance : he thrusts 
his antagonists straight over the crupper, he sends 
them rolling on the ground, and clutching its sand 
with their fingers. Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and 
best of all the Paynim knights, never succeeded in 



THE LAST DECADE. 201 

wiping off this defeat ; and it is tolerably certain 
that no one else will. The language of the piece is 
unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; 
but the logic is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever 
brought to bear. 

The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from 
the pathetic and adventitious interest which attaches 
to them as last, would be in any case among the best of 
their author's, and their value is (at least, as it seems 
to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for 
that on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are 
unfashionable enough not to care very much for the 
eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is satisfactory that 
one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in 
whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, 
if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his 
most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new 
engouemenf for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian 
literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would 
have sung us something in a cautionary strain ; just 
as it can never be sufficiently regretted that he did 
not live long enough to handle Ibsenism. And it 
would have been very particularly pleasant to hear 
him on those Memoirs of a Mongol Mi?zx (as they 
have been profanely called), which are assigned to the 
great Marie Bashkirtseff ; or on those others of the 
learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a friend 
on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry 
one of them, no matter which, and lead both about. 



202 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

But the mixture of freshness, of passion, and of regard 
for conduct in Count Tolstoi could not but appeal to 
him ; and he has given us a very charming causerie 
on Anna Karenina^ notable — like O'Rourke's noble 

feast — to 

" Those who were there 
And those who were not," — 

to those who have read the book itself, and to those 
who have not yet found time to read it. 

I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucu- 
brations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi's deahngs 
with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, 
the Russian nature ; but Mr Arnold's " Amiel " is ad- 
mirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly cor- 
rection," a more dehcate and good-humoured setting 
to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel's 
two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr Arnold's 
own niece and Mr Arnold's own friend). On subjects 
like Maya and the "great wheel" it would almost 
be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to 
find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though 
perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private 
Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness 
with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Gene- 
vese hypochondriac — of whom some one once unkindly 
remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with 
Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache — 
is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the 
quiet decision with which he puts his fine writing in 



THE LAST DECADE. 203 

its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr 
Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to finesse^ grace, 
seh72sucht^ the impalpable and intangible charm of 
melancholy and of thought. And his comments on 
Amiel's loaded pathos and his muddled medita- 
tion are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy 
or less just in the praise which, though not the first, 
he was one of the first to give to by far the strongest 
side of Amiel's talent, his really remarkable power of 
literary criticism. 

But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It 
will have been observed in these brief sketches of his 
work that, since his return to the fields of literature 
proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the causerie and 
farther from the abstract critical essay, — that he had 
taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, 
and interspersed critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, 
though he did not exactly invent it, had perfected, and 
v.'hich somebody, I think, has recently described as 
" intensely irritating." A\'ell ! well ! pearls, as we all 
know, are irritating to certain classes of consumers. He 
had from the first done this well, he now did it con- 
summately. That he took occasion, in the paper on 
Shelley's life which appeared in the Nineteenth Century 
for January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about 
Shelley's poetry, matters nothing at all. It is an inno- 
cent defiance, and no attempt whatever is made to 
support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is 
quite different. Already, some years before, in his 



204 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

article on Keats, Mr Arnold had dealt some pretty 
sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a certain class 
of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and 
morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. 
He had a new and a better opportunity in the 
matter he was now handling, and he struck more 
strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than 
ever. From the moment of its appearance to the 
present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to 
all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its com- 
position is excellent ; it selects just the right points, 
dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them 
just when w^e have had enough. In mere style it 
yields to nothing of its author's, and is conspicuously and 
quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other 
mannerisms. No English writer — indeed one may 
say no writer at all — has ever tempered such a blend 
of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect 
good-breeding. Dryden would have written with an 
equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly ; Voltaire 
with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a 
gentleman — which may also be said of Courier. 
Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of indig- 
nation — honest and healthy, but possibly ]u?>t J)/usquam- 
artistic — at the unspeakable persons who think that 
by blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten 
Shelley. And almost any one would have been likely 
either to commit the complementary error of being too 
severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to 



THE LAST DECADE. 205 

underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. 
Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has 
avoided ; and he has left us in the piece one of the 
most perfect examples that exist of the English essay 
on subjects connected with literature. In its own 
special division of causcrie the thing is not only 
without a superior, it is almost without a peer ; its in- 
sinuated or passing literary comments are usually as 
happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above- 
referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill 
indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon 
after the completion of this little masterpiece ; yet 
he could not have desired to leave the world with a 
better diploma -performance, lodged as an example of 
his actual accomplishment. 

We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, 
to the narrative of biographical events. December 
1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence 
that he was increasingly " spread " (as the French 
say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons — Mr 
Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. 
One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer 
" is getting to like him " — the passages on the author 
of Modern Painters in the earlier letters are certainly 
not enthusiastic — and that " he gains much by his 
fancy being forbidden to range through the world of 
coloured cravats." This beneficial effect of evening 
dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well ex- 
pressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his 



2o6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms 
of life. We hear that Mr J. R. Green "likes the Re- 
formation and Puritanism less the more he looks into 
them," again a not uncommon experience — and that 
Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from 
the review of his Pritner. The next year continues 
the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleas- 
ant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. " My 
poems have had no better friends in their early and 
needy days than my own sisters " — wherein IMr Arnold 
unconsciously quotes Goblin Market^ " there is no 
friend like a sister." Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, 
a la maniere noire ^ as "an ardent, learned, and honest 
man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter to 
Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the 
Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and 
beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of 
the very best, perhaps the very best, of that critic's 
essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed 
later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so pro- 
digiously au se'rieux, just as some of us have been, if not 
distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not 
taking it, wath all its faults, half seriously enough. Geist, 
the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other 
birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and 
botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant 
Duff. 

1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing 
account of a semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman 



THE LAST DECADE. 20/ 

at the Duke of Norfolk's in May, and a very interesting 
series of letters from Pontresina in the autumn. For- 
tunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we 
profit by his letters to her. In one of them there is 
a very pleasing and probably unconscious touch. 
" Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband] smokes 
the whole evening : but I think he has a good heart'' 
And later still we have the curious and not uncharacter- 
istic information that he is reading David Copperfield for 
the first time (whence no doubt its undue predomin- 
ance in a certain essay), and the description of Burns 
as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which has 
been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, 
there is another interview, flattering as ever, with Lord 
Beaconsfield, and later he tells M. Fontanes, " I never 
much Hked Carlyle," which indeed we knew. The 
same correspondent has the only references preserved 
to Dean Stanley's death ; but the magnificent verses 
which that death produced make anything else super- 
fluous. They appeared in the first number of the Nine- 
teenth Century for 1882, when New Year's Day gives 
us a melancholy prediction. If " I live to be eighty 
[/>., in some three years from the present moment], 
I shall probably be the only person in England who 
reads anything but newspapers and scientific publica- 
tions." Too gloomy a view, let us hope j yet with 
something in it. And a letter, a very little later, gives 
us interesting hints of his method in verse composition, 
which was to hunt a Dictionary (Richardson's) for good 



208 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

but unusual words — Theophile Gautier's way also, as it 
happens, though probably he did not know that. 

These later letters contain so many references to 
living people that one has to be careful in quoting 
from them ; but as regards himself, there is of course 
no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which 
always prevented him from scamping work is amaz- 
ingly illustrated in one of October 1882, which tells 
how he sat up till five in the morning rewriting a 
lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up at 
eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope 
that a champagne luncheon there — "chiefly doctors, 
but you know I like doctors " — revived him after 
the night and the journey. And two months later 
he makes pleasant allusion to " that demon Traill," 
in reference to a certain admirable parody of Poor 
Matthias. He had thought Mr Gladstone " hope- 
lessly prejudiced against" him, and was proportion- 
ately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered 
by that Minister a pension ot £^2^0 for service to 
the poetry and literature of England. Few Civil List 
pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr Arnold, 
as most men of his quality would have been, was 
at once struck with the danger of evil constructions 
being put by the baser sort on the acceptance of 
an extra allowance from public funds by a man who 
already had a fair income from them, and a comfort- 
able pension in the ordmary way to look forward to. 
Mr John Morley, however, and Lord Lingen, luckily 



THE LAST DECADE. 20g 

succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very 
basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, 
was that it enabled him to retire, as soon as his time 
was up, without too great loss of income. 

A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and 
October 7, 1883 is the last date from Cobham, "New 
York " succeeding it without any ; for Mr Arnold had 
the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare habit 
of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. 
The St Nicholas Club, "a delightful, poky, dark, ex- 
clusive little old club of the Dutch families," is the 
only place in which he finds peace. For, as one 
expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These 
American letters are interesting reading enough, but 
naturally tend to be little more than a replica of 
similar letters from other Englishmen who have done 
the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted 
here, Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom 
seems to have been independently prompted, to write 
what are called "amusing" letters: he merely tells a 
plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons, scenery, 
manners and customs, &c. Chicago seems to have 
vindicated its character for "character" by hospitably 
forcing him to eat dinner and supper "on end," and 
by describing him in its newspapers as " an elderly 
bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole 
tour, including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five 
months, and brought — not the profit which some people 
expected, but — a good sum, with wrinkles as to more if 

O 



210 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

the experiment were repeated. And when he came back 
to England, the lectures were collected and printed. 

In February 18S5 we have, addressed to his eldest 
daughter, then married and living in America, a def- 
inition of "real civilisation" as the state "when the 
world does not begin till 8 p.m. and goes on from 
that till I A.M., not later.*' This is, though doubtless 
jestful, really a point de repcre for the manners of the 
later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who 
likes society. In the eighteenth, and earlier in the 
nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold practically ab- 
stained from " the world " except quite rarely, while 
" the world " was not busy. The dachshunds come in 
for frequent mention. 

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warn- 
ing of "a horrid pain across my chest," which, how- 
ever, " Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly, alas !] to be not 
heart" but indigestion. The Discourses in America^ 
for which their author had a great predilection, came 
out later. In August the pain is mentioned again ; 
and the subsequent remark, " I was a little tired, but 
the cool champagne at dinner brought me round," is 
another ominous hint that it was not indigestion. 
Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in 
October, one saying, " I think Oxford is still, on the 
whole, the place in the world to which I am most 
attached" ["And so say all of us"]; the other, after 
some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how " I got 
out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of 



THE LAST DECADE. 211 

the Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which 
this landscape always has upon me : the hillside with 
its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley 
below." And this walk is again referred to later. He 
was pleased by a requisition that he should stand yet 
again for the Poetry Professorship, though of course 
he did not accede to it. And at the beginning of 
winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, 
to get some information for the Government as to 
German school fees. He was much lionised, and seems 
to have enjoyed himself very much during his stay, the 
Crown Princess being specially gracious to him. 

Nor was he long in England on his return, 
though long enough to bring another mention of the 
chest pain, and an excellent definition of education 
— would there were no worse ! — " Reading five pages 
of the Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all 
the words I do not know." In February 1886 he 
was back again investigating the Swiss and Bavarian 
school systems ; and that amiable animal -worship of 
his receives a fresh evidence in the mention and 
mourning of the death of " dear Lola " (not Montes, 
but another ; in short, a pony), with a sigh for " a meche 
of her hair." The journey was finished by way of 
France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr 
Arnold was "really [and very creditably] glad to have 
had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnifi- 
cence," that being, it seems, the proper official style 
in addressing the burgomaster. And May took him 



212 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

back to America, to see his married daughter and 
divers old friends. He remained there till the be- 
ginning of September, improving, as he thought, in 
health, but meeting towards the close an awkward 
bathing accident, which involved no risk of drowning, 
but gave him a shock that was followed by a week 
or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the 
chest. There is very much in the letters of the time 
about the political crisis of 1886. His retirement from 
official work came in November, and the letters are 
fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape. 
But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know 
that long before this he had had no delusions about 
their nature. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he had 
ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which 
had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified co7n- 
mentatio mortis dated January 29, 1887, struck down 
his father and grandfather in middle life long before 
they came to his present age. He "refuses every in- 
vitation to lecture or make addresses." The letters of 
1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest, 
except an indication of a visit to Fox How ; while much 
the same may be said of those, also few, from the early 
months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference 
to Robert Elsmerc. Five days later, on April 15, a 
sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, 
and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of 
sixty-three (which he had thought would be " the end as 
well as the climax") by two years and three months. 



213 



CHAPTER VI. 



CONCLUSION. 



The personal matters which usually, and more or less 
gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, 
are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died 
so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew 
Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given 
by some one who knew him more intimately than did 
the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable 
presence, without being in the sense of the painter's 
model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could 
boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial 
smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes 
attributed to him, I think rather unjustly ; but he 
certainly had " tricks and manners " of the kind very 
natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they 
transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we 
know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, 
in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George Russell 
glances at in the preface to the Letters, a passage which 
I read with not a little amusement, because I could 



214 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

confirm it from a memory of my only conversation 
with Mr Arnold. He had been good-humouredly ex- 
postulating with me for overvaluing some French poet. 
I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years 
who it was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some 
such words as, " Well ; perhaps he is not very im- 
portant in himself, but I think he is ' important for us^ 
if I may borrow that." So he looked at me and said, 
"/ didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I 
reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve 
said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite 
forgotten it. Which might, or might not, be Socratic. 
But I should imagine that the complaints of his 
affectations in ordinary society were as much exagger- 
ated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the 
humdrum character of his letters are. Somebody 
talks of the " wicked charm " which a popular epithet 
or nickname possesses, and something of the sort 
seems to have hung about ''The Apostle of Culture," 
"The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and the rest. 
He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as 
he was unduly given to the use of these catch-words, 
not because he in any undue way affected to " look 
the part " or live up to them. And as for the letters, 
it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, 
with clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust 
a very Scriblerus ; that he had, so far as the published 
letters show us, no very intimate friend, male or (still 
better) female, outside his own family ; and further, that 



CONCLUSION. 215 

the degeneration of the art of letter-writing is not a 
mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my readers many 
— or any — correspondents like Scott or like Southey, 
like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sevigne 
or like Lady Mary ? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, 
the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence 
of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best 
letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this 
simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had 
it ; but then Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed 
into his letters, as did Southey's talent of universal 
writing, and Lamb's unalterable quintessence of quaint- 
ness. But though I will allow no one to take pre- 
cedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sevigne, 
I do not think that simplicity is exactly the note of 
that beautiful and gracious person ; it is certainly not 
that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace Walpole, 
or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, 
or suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write 
with at least a sidelong glance at possible publication ; 
some with a deliberate intention of it ; all, I think, 
with a sort of unconscious consciousness of " how it 
will look " on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's letters 
there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to 
comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a 
"point" or a phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his 
family (and it should be remembered that the immense 
majority of the letters that we possess are family letters) 
he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity does 



2l6 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the 
very early letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham 
Slade, is there any appearance of second thought, ol 
" conceit," in the good sense. Later, he seems to have 
been too much absorbed in his three functions of official, 
critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter 
and talk without effort. 

But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little 
as to letter-writing, it was by no means the same in 
those other functions which have been just referred to. 
In later years (it is Mr Humphry Ward, I think, who 
is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but occa- 
sional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular 
avocation from task - work ; and there is abundant 
evidence that, willingly or unwillingly, he never allowed 
either to usurp the place of the vocation which he had 
accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so scrupulous. 
It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men 
boast of getting through their work somehow or other, 
that they may devote themselves to parerga which they 
like, and which they are pleased to consider more 
dignified, more important, nearer the chief end of man. 
And from the extremely common assumption that other 
people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, 
one may at least not uncharitably suppose that a much 
larger number would so act if they dared, or had the 
opportunity. This was not Mr x\rnold's conception of 
the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which 
gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have 



CONCLUSION. 217 

performed his actual inspecting duties with that exact 
punctiUousness which in such cases is much better than 
zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his art 
on the requirements, and not the strict requirements 
only, of his craft. The unfitness of poets for business 
has been often enough proved to be a mere fond thing 
vainly invented ; but it was never better disproved than 
in this particular instance. 

Of the manner in which he had discharged these 
duties, some idea may be formed from the volume of 
Reports which was edited, the year after his death, by 
Sir Francis Sandford. It would really be difficult to 
imagine a better display ot that " sweet reasonableness," 
the frequency of which phrase on a man's lips does not 
invariably imply the presence of the corresponding thing 
in his conduct. It would be impossible for the most 
plodding inspector, who never dared commit a sonnet 
or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing 
better acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or 
more business-like abstinence from fads, and flights, and 
flings. Faint and far-off suggestions of the biographer 
of Arminius may, indeed, by a very sensitive reader, be 
discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion that the 
Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was 
justly fond) should be taught in primary schools, and 
in the rather perverse coupling of " Scott and Mrs 
Hemans." But these are absolutely the only approaches 
to naughtiness in the whole volume. It is a real misfor- 
'tune that the nature of the subject should make readers 



2l8 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of the book unlikely to be ever numerous ; for it supplies 
a side of its author's character nowhere else (except in 
glimpses) provided by his extant work. It may even be 
doubted, by those who have read it, whether "cutting 
blocks with a razor" is such a Gothamite proceeding 
as it is sometimes held to be. For in this case the 
blocks are chopped as well as the homehest bill-hook 
could do it ; and we know that the razor was none the 
blunter. At any rate, the ethical document is one of 
the highest value, and very fit, indeed, to be recom- 
mended to the attention of young gentlemen of genius 
who think it the business of the State to provide for 
them, and not to require any dismal drudgery from them 
in return. 

But the importance of Mr Arnold to English history 
and English literature has, of course, little or nothing 
to do with his official work. The faithful performance 
of that work is important to his character ; and the 
character of the work itself colours very importantly, 
and, as we have seen, not perhaps always to unmitigated 
advantage, the nature of his performances as a man of 
letters. But it is as a man of letters, as a poet, as a 
critic, and perhaps most of all as both combined, that 
he ranks for history and for the world. 

A detailed examination of his poetic performance 
has been attempted in the earlier pages of this little 
book, as well as some general remarks upon it ; but we 
may well find room here for something more general still. 
That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank 



CONCLUSION. 219 

as he is admittedly of an older creation, has always been 
held ; and here, as elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt 
innovation. In fact, though it may seem unkind to say 
so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever tried to 
elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the 
poet, unless he thought he could write great prose and 
knew he could not write great poetry. But in another 
order of estimate than this, Mr Arnold's poetic work 
may seem of greater value than his prose, always ad- 
mirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, 
if we take each at its best. 

At its best — and this is how^, though he would him- 
self seem to have sometimes felt inclined to dispute the 
fact, we must reckon a poet. His is not poetry of the 
absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like that of 
Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere 
juvenility is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; 
nor is it, on the other hand, like that of Wordsworth, who 
flies and flounders with an incalculable and apparently 
irresponsible alternation. It is rather — though I should 
rank it far higher, on all but the historic estimate, than 
Gray's — like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein, 
or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most 
real and rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly 
broken by faults, and never very thick ; the spring is 
intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. There 
is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield freely, to 
run clear and constant. And — again as in the case of 
Gray — the poet subjects himself to a further disability by 



220 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

all manner of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply 
with this or that system, theories, formulas, tricks. He 
will not " indulge his genius." And so it is but rarely 
that we get things like the Scholar- Gipsy^ like the For- 
saken Merman^ like the second Isolation ; and when we 
do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of 
the peroration to Sohrab and Rustum^ and perhaps the 
splendid opening of Westitiinster Abbey and Thyrsis^ a 
certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of 
the singing-robe. There is too seldom the sensation 
which Coleridge unconsciously suggested in the poem 
that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth century. 
We do not feel that 



that 



'The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 
The funow followed free " — 

' We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea ; " 



but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is 
taking place, that we are pleased and orderly spectators 
standing round, and that the ship is gliding in due 
manner, but with no rush or burst, into the sea of 
poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense 
of effort and preparation without the success. 

But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his 
best things, and secondly by a certain aura or atmos- 
phere, by a nameless, intangible, but sensible quality^ 
which, now nearer and fuller, now farther and tamter, 
is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr 



CONCLUSION. 221 

Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above 
and others, even many others, are the right things. 
They do not need the help of that rotten reed, the 
subject, to warrant and support them ; we know that 
they are in accordance with the great masters, but we 
do not care whether they are or not. They sound the 
poetic note ; they give the poetic flash and iridescence ; 
they cause the poetic intoxication. Even in things not 
by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow 
that gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the 
undertone in Bacchanalia — 

" Ah ! so the silence was. 
So was the hush ; " 

the honey-dropping trochees of the New Streets; the 
description of the poet in Resignation ; the outburst — 

" What voices are these on the clear night air ?" 

of Tristram and Iseult ; the melancholy meditation of 
A Summer Night and Dover Beach, with the plangent 
note so cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the 
general tone and motive of the piece, — these and a 
hundred other things fulfil all the requirements of the 
true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only asks 
for, the differentia of poetry. 

And this poetic moment — this (if one may use the 
words, about another matter, of one who wrote no 
poetry, yet had more than all but three or four poets), 
this *'exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss 



222 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" 
which poetry and poetry alone confers upon the fit 
readers of it — is never far off or absent for long to- 
gether in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is 
indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from The 
Strayed Reveller to Westminster Abbey, it may happen 
at any minute, and it does happen at many minutes. 
This is what makes a poet : not the most judicious 
selection of subject, not the most studious contem- 
plation and, as far as he manages it, representation of 
the grand style and the great masters. And this is 
what Mr Arnold has. 

That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and 
invaluable as it often is in matter, is on the whole 
inferior to his verse, is by no means a common opinion, 
though it was expressed by some good judges both dur- 
ing his life and at the time of his death. As we have 
seen, both from a chance indication in his own letters 
and from Mr Humphry Ward's statement, he took very 
great pains with it ; indeed, internal evidence would be 
sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external 
testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, 
when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated 
model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early 
Georgian " drabness " by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, 
and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any 
of the three, was still the academic standard ; but when 
a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace 
and colour on the other, were being taken from the 



CONCLUSION. 223 

new experiments of nineteenth - century prose proper. 
Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the 
greatest master of this particular blend is a question 
which no doubt had best be answered by the individual 
taste of the competent. I should say myself that Mr 
Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold 
ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that 
magnificent passage on the passing of the Middle Ages 
and on the church-bell sound that memorises it. And 
Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at times 
amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his 
middle period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. 
But he did not quite keep his friend's high level of 
distinction and te7iiie. It v>'as almost impossible for Mr 
Arnold to be slipshod — I do not mean in the sense of 
the composition-books, which is mostly an unimportant 
sense, but in one quite different ; and he never, as Mr 
Froude sometimes did, contented himself with correct 
but ordinary writing. If his defect was mannerism, his 
quality was certain manner. 

The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and 
the most doubtful of his mannerisms was, of course, the 
famous iteration, which was probably at first natural, but 
which, as we see from the Letters^ he afterwards deliber- 
ately fostered and accentuated, in order, as he thought, 
the better to get his new ideas into the heads of what the 
type-writer sometimes calls the "Br?/tish" pubhc. That 
it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument, 
and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will 



224 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

be even more teased by it than we are, because to him 
the ideas it enforces will be, and will have been ever 
since he can remember, obvious and common -place 
enough. But when this and some other peccadillos 
(on which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the 
composition - books aforesaid) were absent or even 
moderately present, sometimes even in spite of their 
intrusion, Mr Arnold's style was of a curiously fascinating 
character. I have often thought that, in the good sense 
of that unlucky word " genteel," this style deserves it 
far more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of 
Temple; while in its different and nineteenth-century 
way, it is as much a model of the "middle" style, 
neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as 
Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three 
writers just mentioned keep their place, except with 
deliberate students of the subject, rather by courtesy or 
prescription than by actual conviction and relish on the 
part of readers : and it is possible that something of 
the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, 
when his claims come to be considered by other genera- 
tions from the merely formal point of view. Nor can 
those claims be said to be very securely based in respect 
of matter. It is impossible to believe that posterity will 
trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism 
on which he wasted so much precious time and energy; 
they will have been arranged by the Prince's governor 
on the shelves, with Hobbe^s mathematics and Southey's 
political essays. " But the criticism," it will be said, 



CONCLUSION. 225 

'•^that ought to endure." No doubt from some points 
of view it ought, but will it ? So long, or as soon, as 
English literature is intelligently taught in universities, 
it is sure of its place in any decently arranged course of 
Higher Rhetoric ; so long, or as soon, as critics consider 
themselves bound to study the history and documents 
of their business, it will be read by them. But what 
hold does this give it ? Certainly not a stronger hold 
than that of Dryden's Essay of Drainatic Poesy, which, 
though some of us may know it by heart, can scarcely 
be said to be a commonly read classic. 

The fact is — and no one knew this fact more thor- 
oughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, 
than Mr Arnold himself — that criticism has, of all 
literature that is really literature, the most precarious 
existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong 
in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which 
creation is so scornfully denied by some ; and old 
critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some 
of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help 
regretting that so long a time has been lost in put- 
ting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and 
fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold's 
prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of 
such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, 
and a large part of the cause, of the great and con- 
tinued popularity of De Quincey ; and it is a thousand 
pities that, before a generation arises which knows him 
not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As 

p 



226 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

it is, not a little of his work has never been reprinted 
at all ; some of the rest is difficult of access, and 
what there is exists in numerous volumes of different 
forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. 
And if his prose work seems to me inferior to his 
poetical in absolute and perennial value, its value is 
still very great. Not so much English prose has that 
character of grace, of elegance, which has been vindi- 
cated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to 
forget such consummate examples of it. Academic 
urbanity is not so universal a feature of our race — 
the constant endeavour at least to "live by the law 
of the peras" to observe lucidity, to shun exaggera- 
tion, is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, 
that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and 
champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in 
the revolutions of literary view which have distin- 
guished the latter half of the nineteenth century in 
England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected 
at the peril of the generations and the individuals 
that forget or neglect him. 

Little need be added about the loss of actual 
artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring. Mr 
Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the 
same keenness of dehght with which we read him in 
poetry; but he will yield delight more surely. His 
manner, except in his rare "thorn-crackling" moments, 
and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less 



CONCLUSION. 227 

agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has 
a hardly to be exaggerated charm. 

But it is in his general literary position that Mr 
Arnold's strongest title to eminence consists. There 
have certainly been greater poets in English : I think 
there have been greater critics. But as poet and 
critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge 
can be for a moment placed beside him : the fate 
of the false Florimel must await all others who 
dare that adventure. And if he must yield — yield 
by a long way — to Dryden in strength and easy 
command of whatsoever craft he tried, to Coleridge 
in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he 
has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cos- 
mopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and un- 
scholarly ; beside his directness of aim, if not always 
of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost 
business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vague- 
ness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, 
in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. 
Here was a man who could not only criticise but 
create ; who, though he may sometimes, like others, 
have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, 
and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in 
the main make practice and preaching fit together. 
Here was a critic against whom the foolish charge, 
"You can break, but 3^ou cannot make," was con- 
fessedly impossible — a poet who knew not only the 



228 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

rule of thumb, but the rule of the uttermost art. In 
him the corruption of the poet had not been the 
generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in 
the two arts, himself secure and supreme in both, 
had scornfully said. Both faculties had always ex- 
isted, and did always exist, side by side in him. He 
might exercise one more freely at one time, one at 
another; but the author of the Preface of 1853 was 
a critic, and a ripe one, in his heyday of poetry, the 
author of Westmifister Abbey was a poet in his mel- 
lowest autumn of criticism. 

And yet he was something more than both these 
things, more than both of these at once. But for that 
unlucky divagation in the Wilderness, his life would have 
been the life of a man of letters only as far as choice 
went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession 
superadded. And even with the divagation it was 
mainly and really this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold 
in his unflinching devotion to literature we must, I 
fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to Coleridge, we 
must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again 
we may find something in him beyond both, in that 
he had an even nobler conception of Literature than 
either. That he would have put her even too high, 
would have assigned to her functions which she is 
unable to discharge, is true enough ; but this is at 
least no vulgar error. x\gainst ignoble neglect, against 
stolid misunderstanding, against mushroom rivalry, he 



CONCLUSION. 229 

championed her alike. And it was most certainly from 
no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I 
am quite sure it was not from any desire for a canary 
ribbon or a sixteen -pointed star. Yet, after Southey 
himself in the first half of the century, who has done so 
much for letters qua letters as Mr Arnold in the second ? 
His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of 
the popular departments of literature. But he wrote, 
and I think he could write, nothing that was not litera- 
ture, in and by the fact that he was its writer. It has 
been observed of others in other kinds, that somehow 
or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts 
or crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts 
and crafts in dignity, they bestowed on them as it were 
a rank, a position. A few — a very few — at successive 
times have done this for literature in England, and Mr 
Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in ours. 
One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for 
position, even for fame — for anything but the devoir 
of the born and sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. 
Such devotion need not, of course, forbid others of 
their servants to try his shield now and then with 
courteous arms or even at sharps — as he tried many. 
But it was so signal, so happy in its general results, 
so exactly what was required in and for England at 
the time, that recognition of it can never be frank 
enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. 
Whenever I think of Mr Arnold it is in those own 



230 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 

words of his, which I have quoted already, and which 
I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as I began 
this little book in the time of fritillaries — 

" Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
Still clutching the inviolable shade " — 



the hope and shade that never desert, even if they 
flit before and above, 
the humaner literature. 



flit before and above, the servants and the lovers of 



INDEX. 



Alaric at Rome, 4. 

Bacchanalia, or the New Age, 

114. 
Balder Dead, 52, 53. 
Byron, Poetry of, ed. Arnold, 185. 

Celtic Literature, On the Study of, 

66, 104 et seq. 
Church of Brou, The, 38. 
Consolation, 28. 
Cromwell, 8, 9. 
Culture and Anarchy, 128 et seq. 

Discourses in America, 195. 
Dover Beach, 112. 

Em.pedocles on Etna, 23. 

Essays in Criticism, 83 et seq., 

123. 
Eton, A French, 79 et seq. 

Farervell, A, 27. 
Forsaken Merman, The, 19. 
French Eton, A, jg et seq. 
Frietid, To a, sonnet, 15. 
Friendship' s Garland, 148. 

God and the Bible, 137. 

Heine's Grave, 115. 
Homer, On Translating, 66. 

In Utrumque Paratus, 20. 
Irish Essays, 151. 
Isolation, 31. 



Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. 
Arnold, 169. 

Last Essays on Church and Re- 
ligion, 137, 142. 
Letters, i, ic^etseq., 214. 
Lines written by a Death-bed, 32. 
Literature and Dogma, 131 et seq. 
Longing, 30. 

Marguerite, To, 31. 
Alemorial Verses, 26. 
Alerjnan, The Forsaken, 19. 
Merope, 60. 

Mixed Essays, 16S et seq. 
Modern Sappho, The, 17. 
Mycerinus, 13. 

A^«?m; Sirens, The, 17. 

Obermann, 53. 

0« //zc' Rhine, 29. 

Ot? ///^ Study of Celtic Literature, 

66, 104 e/ j^<7. 
C>;z //z^ Terrace at Berne, 16. 
0« Translating Homer, 66. 

Preface, the, to the ' Poems ' of 

1853, 33 et seq. 
Prose Passages, 166. 

Renan, Arnold's relations with, 

lOI, 

Reqjiiescaf, 39. 
Resignation, 20, 185. 
Rugby Chapel, 115. 



232 



INDEX. 



Sainte-Beuve, 59, 203. 
Scholar-Gipsy, The, 5, 40 et seq. 
Schools and Universities on the 

Continent, 116. 
Selected Poems, 184. 
Shairp, Principal, lines on Arnold 

by, 5- 
Shakespeare, Sonnet to, 15. 
Sick King in Bokhara, 15. 
Sohrab and Rztstian, 37, 51, 52. 
Southey, use of rhymeless metre 

by, II. 
St B randan, iii. 
St Paul and Protestantism, 130 

et seq. 
Stagirius, 19. 

Strayed Reveller, The, 10 et seq. 
Summer Night, A, 26. 



Switzerland, 16. 

Tennyson, influence of, on Arnold, 

19. 
Thyrsis, in. 
To Fatista, 19, 
To Marguerite, 31. 
To my Friends who Ridiculed a 

Tender Leave-taking, 16, 27. 
Tristram and Iseult, 24, 25. 

Voice, The, 19. 

Ward's English Poets, Arnold's 

Introduction to, 189. 
Westminster Abbey, 207, 220, 228. 
Wordsworth, Poems of, ed. Arnold, 

185. 



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